The Women: A Novel Part 10

"She's invited, isn't she?"

"Well, I-of course. You know that. I'm building rooms for her and my aunts-and for you, for you too."

"And your children? The children are there, are they not? Catherine, Llewellyn, David, Frances? One big happy family? Where are they sleeping? Are they so put out by the construction?" He'd turned to her and she came right up to him now, thrusting her face in his. "You're a liar, Frank. A liar. And a ghoul, that's what you are, because you prefer some, some corpse to me! A memory! A dead thing!" She veered away from him, her hand s.n.a.t.c.hing for something, anything she could heft, one of his d.a.m.ned statues, anything-but he caught her by the wrist.

"Don't you say a word against her," he said, tightening his grip.

She twisted away from him, jerked her wrist free, and here was one of his vases and she didn't give two figs what dynasty it hailed from or what precious artisanic soul had fired it in whichever golden Chinese era-and were they all golden?-it was in her hand and then it was gone, obliterated against the wall. "Go ahead," she said, "hit me," but she spun out of reach, flung herself across the room and then came at him so swiftly he had to backtrack.

"Cold meat, Frank. But I'm alive, a real live flesh-and-blood woman!" Both her hands were at her collar now and in a single savage jerk she tore the dress to her waist, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s falling free even as the cold air of the room a.s.saulted her. "Look at me. Look at my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. You've fondled them enough. Suckled them like an infant. They were good enough for you then. And now you prefer a corpse, a corpse over me?"

His face was blanched. He was backing away from her. "Miriam," he pleaded.

"No! No! I'll kill myself first-is that what you want? Is it? Two corpses?"

In the morning-Christ knew where he'd spent the night-two of his a.s.sistants appeared at the door, the mole-hair and another tight-mouthed drudge who looked at her as if she were the Gorgon herself. They were there to pack up Mr. Wright's things and remove them to his offices. What things? she demanded, but she already knew. And she didn't attempt to stop them, not by any means. If he wanted to run out on her, desert her, leave her bereft and unprovided for like the cad he was, well, she wasn't about to stop him. She took a cab to Marshall Field's, though she detested the place, and when she returned there was no trace of him at 25 East Cedar Street but for the furniture itself-even his toothbrush was gone. Again she put off telephoning to his offices and again she broke down. Just as she'd suspected, he was at Taliesin and couldn't be reached.

This time he didn't come back. And though it ate at her, through every minute of every day, she stayed on in the empty house. Every time she heard a noise in the street, the sc.r.a.pe of a shoe along the walk or a voice lifted in greeting, she was sure it was him, sure he'd come back to her, but she was disappointed. Over and over again. As the days wore on, she steeled herself-she had resources of her own. And she had her pravaz and a prescription from a very forward-looking physician whose address she'd found in the directory. And this was her house now and she would be d.a.m.ned if she was going to leave it.

Of course, she wrote him-daily, sometimes two or three times a day. She telephoned to him as well and when she did manage to reach him, he seemed distracted-and guilty too-and though he tried to act as if nothing were the matter, as if he was simply preoccupied with the building at Taliesin, she couldn't really be held accountable if her voice did rise above an acceptable level because she was only human, as she reminded him, and not a memory. Or was she? Then his letters, which had been sympathetic, solicitous, kind-but distant, as if he were writing to an aunt or a sister away on a foreign mission-turned more resolute, as if he had finally understood that he and she could never be reconciled again. The one that hurt her most, the one that drove her out of his house and into a first-cla.s.s compartment on a train headed west for Albuquerque,99 addressed her in tender reminiscent terms, especially as he talked of her charms and the thrill of knowing and loving her and how terrible he felt for having abandoned her. But it was a letter of discharge and no doubt about it. Because he was a little man. Because love-with her, at any rate-led inevitably, through stages, to ruin. "Reason is gone!" he wrote, invigorating the apostrophe with his overwrought punctuation. "Charity is gone-Now comes Fear-Hate-Revenge-Punishment-Then Regret-Shame-Humiliation-Ashes, It is the accepted Road-all ambitious Souls hear me! s.e.x is the curse of Life!"

She brooded over this ugly proposition all the dreary way across the country-s.e.x the curse of life, indeed; he hadn't felt that way on Christmas Eve when he'd had her twice in succession and then again the following morning, the celebration of Christ's birth and the sacred hymns of the angelic choir notwithstanding. Or in the weeks after when he'd installed her in his house like a houri extracted from his harem and had his way with her whenever the urge struck him, which was any time of the day or night because he was as randy as a goat, the randiest man she'd ever been exposed to, even in France, even in Italy. And now, suddenly, s.e.x was the curse of life. He'd twisted everything, the hypocrite, making her out to be the one at fault, reducing the monumentality of what they'd had together to a vulgar expression of s.e.xual gratification as if they were apes in the jungle or some such rot. Well, she wouldn't have it. And she wrote back to him, page after page, her emotions burning into her fingertips, the fountain pen, the ink that seared the very paper before her.

She blasted him, of course she did, but she expressed the fullness of her love too-and it was no infatuation, she reminded him, but a mature and spiritual love that stood against the petty conventions of a society bound up in its petty rules.100 She wouldn't go to Taliesin if he begged her. She couldn't. "Because a spirit walked abroad there whose presence must not be offended by one who truly loved him." She went on in this vein, dredging up every Gothic reference to churchyards, yew trees and demon lovers she could recall, then began to remonstrate with him. Couldn't he, above all people, with his finer sensibilities and conceptual brilliance, appreciate that this pining after a ghost was so false, so cheap, nothing more than two-penny sentimentality, a poor flimsy excuse for real love and loyalty? And she asked him, humbly and sincerely, if he wouldn't accept gratefully a poor loving heart that he had mutilated beyond all thinking. He was the one in the wrong, couldn't he see that? Couldn't he see all she was offering him, in spite of the condemnation of that pitiless and cheaply moralizing society that made her an outcast for the "sin" of loving him? Even as she wrote, absorbed, distracted, resentful and br.i.m.m.i.n.g with love all at once, she felt the strength come back to her.

"I SHALL WIN!" she exclaimed. "You'll see! When the smoke of battle clears away I shall be a rainbow again-and, undying name-an altar of fire that you have tried to dash to h.e.l.l. I shall weave a rose wreath and hang it round your neck. You will call it a yoke of bondage and curse it-no matter. You are afraid of the light I give you. You crouch in darkness. Come, take my hand, I will lead you." And her valediction, intimating in its restraint whole worlds of love and grief and pa.s.sionate regret, was, simply, Miriam.

And then she arrived, shriven, on the high altar of the west, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos. She went barefoot in the mornings. She wors.h.i.+pped the sky. Took eau naturelle and unleavened bread. Wrapped herself in diaphanous things and let Jesus and Mary Baker Eddy apply their healing touch to her soul. Time was a mountain. Waters flowed, the wind blew. She watched the eagles rise on the thermals over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as if they held all the power of the universe in their wings-or perhaps they were vultures, but no matter. She was there. She lived in the moment.

Gradually, his letters softened. Guilt ate at him-he'd seduced and abandoned her when she'd given up everything for him, even to the opprobrium of society, and he understood that now and begged her forgiveness. He sent money. He needed her. Wanted her. Pleaded with her to come back to him-and not just to Chicago, but to Taliesin, to be its mistress. And she? She let him dangle, reveling in her power to reach out to him across all that expanse of raw country and tighten the clamps of her hold on him. So what if it was venereal? He needed her. And he would see what she could give him beyond that, beyond the curse of s.e.x-and yes, she threw the phrase right back in his face. They would walk the world together, she wrote him, hand in hand, stride for stride, and challenge the very G.o.ds for their sublimity.

By July, she was back in Chicago. By the end of August, she was at Taliesin.101

CHAPTER 4: FLESH AND BLOOD.

He was lonely, that was the long and short of it. Despite the fullness of the days at Taliesin and his utter absorption in the work going forward, despite the company of his children and the ministrations of Mother Breen, despite riding and farming and picnicking and charades and board games and singing round the fire at night till he thought his lungs would burst, he was parched for the touch of a woman. Miriam was right. Mamah was a ghost, dead and gone, and you couldn't lie with a ghost. The thought might have been callous-Mamah hadn't been in the ground a year yet and already she was as faded in his memory as if she'd been gone a century, and perhaps that was a trick of the brain, a defense mechanism, a way of loosening the coils of grief so they didn't choke all the air out of your lungs and drain the blood from your heart-but all he could see in his mind's eye was Miriam. Miriam undressing by candlelight, teasing him, flaunting herself, perching naked on the corner of the bed and pulling him down atop her, Miriam with her b.r.e.a.s.t.s exposed over the sweet silken curve of her abdomen, her dress in tatters, crying Look at me, I'm flesh and blood, flesh and blood!

Well, so was he. And he found himself burying his face in her letters to catch the faintest scent of her, all the while wondering what she was doing out there in New Mexico-had she taken another lover, was that it? She was a matchless beauty, elegant, brilliant, worldly, and if he'd seen nothing like her in Chicago, what must the hidalgos have thought of her out there under the open sky? He pictured her in the arms of a tall mustachioed figure in a sombrero, some sunburned hybrid of Tom Mix and Teddy Roosevelt, and felt the loss of her like a physical ache. But then it was a physical ache when you came right down to it. And he soothed it in a way that was juvenile, unclean and lonely, lonely to the core.

He was there at the station in Chicago when she stepped off the train in a fumarole of porters, bags and scuffling shoes, the engine spewing cinders and ash, steam rising and pigeons settling like an avian snow, people crying out, families reunited, lovers embracing-even a pair of Alsatians wagging their tails and capering for joy-but she didn't seem to recognize him, not at first. Down the platform she came in a magnificent stride that was at once commanding and unabashedly sensual, the Negro porters scurrying to keep up with her and a whole series of men glancing up from newspapers and cigars like dominoes toppling one against the other all the way down the line. He felt the blood drain from his extremities and settle in that one essential place-he knew those eyes, those limbs, those b.r.e.a.s.t.s-but didn't she know him? Didn't she recognize him? He started forward, his confidence wilting, wondering if she was still harboring a grudge-or was it her eyesight? She was of an age-and she did employ that lorgnette as something more than a prop . . . "Miriam!" he cried, his voice cracking under the strain even as he lurched out from behind a wall of anonymous men hunched over their cheap suitcases and made himself glaringly visible, his stick raised high and his cape flowing in the liquefaction of its folds. She stopped. Turned toward him. He tore the beret from his head and waved it wildly. And then? Then she was in his arms.

"How was your journey?" he asked, leading her out to the street and the car as the porters brought up the rear and the searing summer air streamed in through the open doors.

"Oh, darling, darling, you don't want to know."

"Was it that bad?" He tried out a smile, ready to make light of it, but his blood was seething, the very touch of her, the scent . . .

"Heat," she said, never missing a stride, and then she was directing the Negroes as they loaded her things into the car. "Like this. Heat like this. Only worse. There was the dust, eternal dust, and people so inconsiderate-and I hate to say it, stupid, stupid and thoughtless-as to leave the windows open wide day and night. Insects. I could write a treatise on the insects of the West and Middle-West. But let's not talk about me, let's talk about you. You look thinner. Or thicker. Definitely thicker about the waist. Have you put on weight? Is the life in the country"-and here she gave him her first smile-"so restful, then? Unclouded days, sap running in the trees, the easeful sway of the hammock? All that?"

He was off then, off on a speech of his own, settling into his rhythms like a jockey feeling the stride of his mount on the stretch run, gabbling on about the structural problems they were encountering, the vagaries of his workforce, the lay of the stone they were quarrying and the quality of the lumber from the mill, not to mention the fluidity of the design and the changes of conception he was making daily, and Paul Mueller, of course, Paul's contributions, and the j.a.panese, how they were becoming increasingly cordial in their communications and how certain he was that the big project was going to go through. They were halfway across town before she stopped him. "Well," she said, giving him a coy look from beneath the wide floral brim of her hat, "didn't you miss me?"

He had. He did. The blood shot to his groin again. And then the next speech was spinning out of him with all the fluidity and spontaneous grace he'd inherited from his preacher father.102 He was indicting himself, begging her forgiveness and forbearance, pledging fealty and love and unraveling a whole spool of excuses, when she stopped him again. "Oh, that's all very gratifying," she said, raising her voice to be heard over the racket of the motor and the yapping of some sort of mongrel or other that had been chasing behind the wheels for the past block and a half, "but where are you taking me?" Another look from beneath the shade of the hat. Her smile was full now, her eyes dancing, lips swollen. And licked. Licked wet with the pink retreating tip of her tongue. "And for what purpose?"

He fumbled a moment, the open wound of Taliesin still lying b.l.o.o.d.y between them, and the oratorical flow, the sheer dance of words, stuttered short. "I, well, I thought we'd, maybe-if you have no objections, that is, and I know you must be exhausted-"

"The Garfield?" she said, and the way she said it, so casually, so gracefully, so lewdly, made it the most exciting thing he'd ever heard.

"No," he said, grinning, and for the first time since they'd got in the car he reached out a hand to touch her intimately, on the upper thigh, where the material of her dress had pulled tight beneath her when she slid into the seat. "I thought the Congress."

Two days later-and what choice did he have?-he moved her back into the little house at 25 East Cedar Street and did his best to overlook her moods and dietary peculiarities, her florid speeches about art and literature and her continued insistence that he sit for a marble bust. He hadn't time to sit for a bust, he kept protesting (gently, ever so gently). He was a working architect, preoccupied with the business of the world. And busts, in any case, were for dead heroes, for military men and the like. No, she countered, not at all-what of Rodin's bust of Balzac? Of Hugo? Granted, they were in bronze, but marble was for the ages-as he was. He might have told her it was architecture that was for the ages, but he kept the thought to himself. What he wanted, above all, was harmony, and he was determined to establish it this time around, to give as well as take, because he'd suffered the long withering attrition of her absence. If he had to nurture her, if he had to put up with a pillow here or there and eat French food once in a blue moon, what of it? She was his star, his torch, his impetus. Was he in love? He couldn't say. But she was on his arm when he went to the concert hall, when he went out to dine or simply take the air, and she was there in his bed at night, as warm and loving and virtuosic as any man could ever hope to ask or dream.

Inevitably, the question of Taliesin came up again. It emerged one morning out of a perfectly ordinary breakfast conversation. The new cook, a fox-faced girl with a wandering eye and a West Virginia coal miner's accent, an adept at plain things, flapjacks and sidemeat, eggs over easy, grits and hot black coffee, had just served breakfast and taken herself off to hide in the kitchen, and he was commenting on a piece in the paper about the building costs a.s.sociated with one of the new skysc.r.a.pers going up along Michigan Avenue, when Miriam, looking up from her own newspaper, said, "Isn't it time you took me up to Wisconsin?"

She was dressed all in white, in a clinging gown of silk, and her hair was loose on her shoulders. The lorgnette dangled from one hand, swaying gently back and forth like a hypnotist's watch. In her other hand, balanced delicately, a teacup held in abeyance. She was smiling, congenial, insouciant, the question no more charged than a query about the weather or what color hat he might like to see her in.

He never hesitated. From the moment he'd written her to come back to him he saw how selfish he'd been, demanding her full commitment and loyalty and yet all the while keeping her off-balance so that she was never certain of her status. Small wonder she had her moods. It was his fault. Entirely his. He set down the newspaper and gazed steadily into her eyes. "We'll drive up tomorrow," he said.103 The day was clear, the road untrammeled. He was whistling, fiddling with the gears.h.i.+ft, the choke, feeling as light as the puffs of cloud running high overhead across the pale blue roof of the world. Every bend in the road, every tree and cow, whether it be Holstein, Jersey or Swiss Brown, was the subject of a spontaneous discourse, and he couldn't help himself, his tongue running ahead of him, the joy of possession working on him like the heady poteen the Irish laborers drank behind his back when he could smell it on their breath and see it in the delirious dance of their too-green eyes. Miriam sat beside him, uncharacteristically silent, a soft smile on her lips. How could she be so calm? he wondered. How could she not feel what he was feeling, this bubbling joy that made him want to burst into song? He stepped on the accelerator, rocketing past a tractor towing a cart piled high with corn, the wheels churning up twin tornadoes of dust and the back end wagging with the thrust of the engine, and suddenly he was singing, singing for her, singing for the joy of it. He sang "Clementine" twice through and then "Old Kent Road," and so what if the farmers stared and his voice floated on down the road behind him like the windblown squawk of the summer geese charging from one pond to another? He was happy. Purely happy.

They stopped for luncheon in Cross Plains, after which she grew calmer still, so much so she might have been comatose-or lost in a deep waking sleep. He kept shooting glances at her, her hair fluttering in the breeze, her eyes fixed straight ahead, her frame in perfect equipoise as if she were balancing on an invisible wire, and eventually he fell silent himself. A thought had occurred to him. A nagging unsettling thought, one he'd tried to suppress through the course of these running days. It had to do with what he knew of Miriam's temperament, how easily it could s.h.i.+ft from light to dark, from this calm to sudden fury, and how that might accord with his mother's moods, not to mention Mrs. Breen's. Mrs. Breen ran the household the way the Kaiser ran his army. And his mother, no wilting flower herself, had taken exception to the housekeeper on any number of grounds ("Don't you dare call that woman Mother, not while I'm in this house").104 Since the construction was progressing rapidly he'd moved her into the new wing-at her insistence-if only for an extended visit till the renovation was completed and the design fully realized, and that was fine. At least for the first day or so, until she and Mrs. Breen began feuding about everything from how to boil an egg to the proper way to make up a bed, set the table and polish silverware. How would they react to Miriam? More to the point: how would Miriam react to them? Distracted, he laid his hand atop hers and she turned to give him a vague smile as the wind took her hair and the sun tugged them forward and the road melted like b.u.t.ter under the glow of it. Like any gambling man, he could only hope for the best.

Miriam seemed to come to life as they made their approach along the Wisconsin River and Taliesin suddenly materialized on the brow of the hill before them. "Is that it?" she asked, straining forward in the seat as he rolled to a stop at the main gate so she could have a chance to admire the house in its proper perspective. "And this is the lake you've talked of? And the dam? And what's that over there to the left?"

"Tan-y-deri," he said. "My sister Jennie's place. And see beyond it? That's Romeo and Juliet."

Her face was flushed. She took hold of his arm at the biceps and pulled him to her for a kiss. "One of your earliest designs," she murmured. "How sweet."

"Sweet?" he said. "I don't know if I'd call it sweet."

"What I mean is the sentiment, of course, the sense of tradition. Your first windmill preserved here on your property and now this grand house, this palace of light and air. It's beautiful. More beautiful than I could have dreamed."

"You like it?"

"Like it? I adore it."

He left the car running as he got out to swing open the gate, seeing the small things, the way the ditch along the drive had eroded in the previous week's storms, the weeds crowding out the wildflowers, the iridescent blue of the damselflies threading the air, and then he was back in the car, s.h.i.+fting into gear and winding on up the hill, thinking he'd send Billy Weston or one of the others down to shut the gate behind him because he didn't want to spoil the moment, intent instead on watching Miriam's face as the house revealed itself by stages. Llewellyn, his youngest-twelve years old that summer and adapting to the life of the farm as if he'd been born to it-appeared out of nowhere to chase the car up the drive in a propulsion of flas.h.i.+ng limbs, head down, elbows pumping and gaining on them even as Frank slowed to let him catch up. And that was a joy to him too, a pleasure Kitty had denied him as long as Mamah was mistress of the place, Mamah her sworn enemy, her nemesis, dead now and gone so that he could have his children back with him for the long stretch of summer, Lloyd and John married and settled but here to pitch in with the rebuilding, Frances home from college, Catherine and David running back and forth between Taliesin and Oak Park.

It was perfect. Ideal. The crowning moment of his life. Everyone together and Miriam here too and how could Kitty possibly object to a woman she'd never met and would never meet because she had to understand that things were dead between them and he had to live his own life in his own way? This was the start of something new, he could feel it, something better, and he pulled into the courtyard riding a wave of hope and optimism.

Everyone crowded round-the children, Billy Weston, even Mrs. Breen-and while the help unloaded their things he took Miriam out on the hilltop to give her a moment to breathe and take in the prospect. He didn't want to overwhelm her. She must have been exhausted from the journey-she wasn't well, he was aware of that-but she was superlatively calm and graceful and full of praise for the place and she had a hundred questions that took them through tea and a leisurely tour of the rooms and artwork before she felt she might want to rest prior to dinner.

Were there ominous signs? His mother claimed to be indisposed and wouldn't emerge from her room. The children-Catherine, especially, who was the neediest and most sensitive and so the one most poisoned by Kitty's invective-drew long faces all around. They were well-bred enough to conceal their feelings, of course, but he could see it would be a struggle to win them over-Miriam was an unknown quant.i.ty, perhaps not the ogre and housebreaker Kitty had made Mamah out to be, but she wasn't their mother either, and he would feel the sting of that in a thousand ways. But worst of all, right from the start, was Mrs. Breen. The minute Miriam had gone in to lie down, she was at his elbow, bellowing out a whole catalogue of questions to which she apparently required no answers, as her ear trumpet was nowhere in sight. She was stalwart, furious, her face compressed and her eyes jumping at him. Where was the lady to sleep? she wanted to know. Would she require anything special in the way of comestibles because she, Mother Breen, was as run-down and worn-out as a woman could be what with feeding all these workmen and the family too, and she was at the end of her tether. And why hadn't the lady removed her shoes at the door because who did she think would wipe up her muddy tracks after her? Did she speak French? Would she eat pork? Was she married? Did she expect maid's service?

He talked all through dinner, talked so steadily and with such a tailing edge of desperation he barely touched his food, and that wasn't like him-not to eat-and they all took notice. His mother sat across from him, icily silent, and while Paul Mueller tried heroically to make general conversation, Llewellyn chirped out an anecdote about the frogs in the upper pond and Miriam was on her best behavior, there was something distinctly off about the whole evening. After dinner he sat at the piano105 and led them through a medley of songs, but Miriam wouldn't join in-was the scene too homely for her, a Parisian sophisticate, was that it?-and his mother lacked enthusiasm. Distinctly. In fact, she seemed to do nothing all night long but stare at Miriam so intently she might have been making a charcoal study of her. They went early to bed, Miriam settled in one of the guest rooms to maintain a sense of propriety, though he didn't give a d.a.m.n for propriety, not under his own roof, and he had to find his way to her bed in the dark.

The following day began auspiciously enough, Miriam up early and looking alert at breakfast while Mrs. Breen confined herself to the kitchen and let one of the maids serve at table. Conversation mainly revolved around the weather-the dew lay heavy on the gra.s.s that morning and there was the breath of a breeze out of the north, which he took to mean that the heat wave of the past weeks was finally dispelling, though both Paul and Lloyd disagreed with him, citing some nonsense out of the Farmer's Almanac about woolly bear caterpillars and the paucity of their coats. Still, to his mind it was undeniably cooler and that was a beneficence-Miriam would be more comfortable and if she was more comfortable she would find it easier to embrace the natural life in the countryside. That was what he was thinking, as she seemed abnormally sensitive to extremes of temperature-abnormally sensitive to practically everything, for that matter-but then that was only to be expected of a highly refined artistic temperament like hers.

He ate with a good appet.i.te-he'd been up since four-thirty, busy in the studio, walking the grounds, tending to the garden and seeing to the horses, afire with energy and the flare of ideas that came to him almost unbidden, at the oddest times, as if inspiration were a vagary of the unconscious and not something to be earned through effort and focus and the application of pencil and T-square. The main house was largely finished now, but there was a whole lot of work yet to be done on the new wings and of course there were always projects on the boards, moneymaking projects, because the costs of rebuilding had exceeded even his wildest estimate and, as usual, he was woefully short106. . .

As the day wore on-and it did get hot, above ninety by noon, though he worked alongside the laborers, loudly insisting that it was cooler by far than yesterday-he lost track of Miriam. He'd taken her on his rounds in the morning, explaining as much as he could about the workings of the place, but she'd developed a headache or heat exhaustion or some such thing and had begged off. "You want me to walk you back?" he'd asked, and she'd given him a smile that shaded into a grimace. "I'm not an invalid," she said firmly, though her voice betrayed her. "I do think I can manage, what is it, three hundred yards on my own?" By the time he gave her another thought it was past five in the afternoon.

The minute he walked into the house he was confronted by his mother. "This woman," she said, all the lines round her mouth drawn tight. "I'm sorry to say it, but she's not a lady, Frank-she's not even civil. She's vulgar and foulmouthed, is what she is. It may be that that sort of language pa.s.ses among the French-for all I know it's the fas.h.i.+on over there-but I won't have it here in my own household, not in the hearing of my grandchildren or the servants either. I won't. I tell you, Frank, I won't."

He wanted a bath-or no, a swim in the lake. His s.h.i.+rt was stuck to his back, his hands and forearms were filthy. He was exhausted. And in no mood. "I'm sorry, Mother, but we'll all have to . . . make adjustments. Miriam is under a great deal of strain, coming up here into the country, and-"

"She diminishes you. She's beneath you. She puts on airs."

And now Mrs. Breen appeared, her eyes savage, the ear trumpet clutched in one hand-and were they allies, had they declared a truce and joined forces to repel the invader in their midst? Had war been declared between lunch and dinner? He was stupefied and he stood there speechless, turning from one furious face to the other. "It's a sorry thing," Mrs. Breen roared, "to see such disrespect. Do you know what sort of vile names she's been calling your own mother? And in my hearing, no less?"

He'd come in the kitchen door, desiring only a gla.s.s of water before pulling on his bathing costume and calling Llewellyn to head down to the lake, and here he was in the docket. "I'm sure it's just a misunderstanding," he said. "Because Miriam-"

"Misunderstanding?" Mrs. Breen had elevated the hearing trumpet and now she dropped it to her side, her attenuated shoulder blades settling like bones in a sack. "To call your mother a meddling old hag? And me. To call me names I wouldn't call the devil himself? And just because I wouldn't jump at her every whim and command, because I have a household to run here if you don't know it and I'm not hired on to be anybody's handmaid-and who does she think she is to command me like I'm some slave out of her plantation in Tennessee or wherever her glorious ancestors hail from, and yes we all got a good earful of that too."

"Frank," his mother cut in. "Frank, now you listen to me-"

He held his hands up in surrender. "I'll speak with her," he said, irritated now, angry, all the satisfaction he'd taken in the day's work driven out of him as if he hadn't accomplished a thing-Sisyphus, this must be what Sisyphus felt like each time he got to the top of the hill. "Right now. Right this minute. Will that satisfy you? It's not enough that I've worked all day under that sun with the laboring men, slaved out there in this heat, and all I want is to have a swim and some quiet before dinner. No. I have to be the one to make peace, when both of you-" he checked himself. His mother was biting her lip. Her eyes were wet. "Where is she?"

"Where is she?" Mrs. Breen threw back at him. "Where she's been the whole day-in her room. And she won't let n.o.body in neither."

She didn't answer to his knock. He tried the k.n.o.b but there seemed to be something blocking the door. "Miriam!" he called. "Miriam, are you in there?" Nothing. Not a whisper. He went round to the window, but she'd blocked that too, the cas.e.m.e.nt locked, some sort of material-was that the bedspread?-tacked up so that he couldn't see inside. He felt a flash of irritation. 107 He pounded the gla.s.s with the flat of his hand, shouted her name again. People were watching him-two of the masons, on their way down the hill to the tavern, had paused by the garage to take in the spectacle, joined now by one of the housemaids swinging a pail of sc.r.a.ps for the hogs-and he cursed under his breath. Couldn't he have a little privacy? Was that too much to ask? In the next moment he was at the door again and this time he put his shoulder to it and felt something give-a piece of furniture sliding back and the door cracking open just enough to give him a view of the darkened room.

At first he could see nothing. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he saw that she'd nailed a series of shadowy objects to the walls, reckless with the plaster and the wood trim too-another flash of irritation-and what were they? Drawings? "Miriam!" he called again, and when she didn't answer he lunged at the door with everything he had till the barricade-a bureau with the desk and two chairs stacked atop it-spilled forward with a splintering crash that could have wakened the dead, and he was in the room. Which was empty. He flicked on the lamp and the walls sprang to life-drawings, yes, dozens of them, each a sketch of his head as seen from every conceivable angle, the features monumental and rugged, hair snaking beyond the margins and his...o...b..ts as deep as Beethoven's, but with the eyes left eerily null-and what was this? Clothes heaped on the bed as if laid out for a rummage sale, hats and shoes and undergarments scattered across the floor, a smashed teacup, a spill of roofing nails and the hammer with which she'd crucified each of the drawings. Her slippers. Her robe. The vertical plane of the bathroom door.

"Miriam? "

He pushed open the door, the first stirrings of alarm working through him like a faint electric current, and there she was. Propped up in the tub. Asleep. Or meditating, perhaps she was meditating. Seeking the cool, the dark-she'd had a headache, hadn't she? That was it, that must have been it. "Miriam?" he tried again.

Her eyes were shut fast, the lids faintly blue, lashes entwined, her head thrown back against the wall-and her mouth, her mouth was slung open over the dark ca.n.a.l of her throat. She was asleep, of course she was, asleep, that was all. His first thought was that she'd been bathing and dozed off, but she was dressed in her nightgown-the material sodden, painted to her limbs-and there was no more than an inch of water in the tub, softly gurgling round the plug. It was then-and it came as a shock, as if he'd been slapped-that he noticed the needle.

A needle. A syringe. The sort of thing the doctor used for injections. It was clinging to the smooth white flesh of her upper thigh, out of place, wrong, deeply wrong, and all he could think of was a parasite, some bloated tick or leech fastened there where it didn't belong. Without thinking, he wrapped his fingers round the thing-cold metal and gla.s.s-and tugged it gently from her flesh, a speck of blood there, a yellowish contusion round the wound, and laid it on the sink. "Wake up," he said softly, taking her by the wrist. "Miriam, wake up."

She gave him nothing.

He pulled her toward him, slapped her once, twice, and then again, till her eyes began to flutter, and where were the smelling salts? Did they have smelling salts? Her breath was rank, flowering in his face with the odor of the swamp plants, the cattails and pickerelweed and the other things that grew with their feet in the water of the pond. He was frightened, his thoughts charging one way and then the other. Should he call the physician? His mother? Mrs. Breen? But this was a private matter, wasn't it? Between him and Miriam? Some mistake with her medicine, nothing to worry over, really, but shouldn't she be in bed?

He clasped her to him then and tried to lift her, dripping, from the tub, but she was surprisingly heavy, her limbs slippery, fish-cold, and it was a job to s.h.i.+ft her weight and gather her up. Her head fell forward across his shoulder, her hair pressed wet to his cheek, and with a final sucking contortion she was in his arms and he was edging out the door and her lips were moving. "Frank," she murmured, "what is it? What are you doing?"

Something grabbed at his feet-one of her balled-up dresses-and he nearly stumbled.

"Frank." Her voice was stronger now, the voice he knew, Miriam's voice, piqued and challenging. "Put me down. What are you thinking?"

His lower back was on fire suddenly and he very nearly dropped her in that shambling half-hobbled moment, but he made it to the bed and let go of her even as she rolled away from him and the mattress gave with a long hissing groan.

"Miriam, for G.o.d's sake," he said, standing over her, breathing hard, his s.h.i.+rt wet and his eyes jumping in his head till they felt like ball bearings. "This, this needle-"

She'd sat up against the headboard, her arms wrapped round her knees. Wet, the hair fell across her face like strands of moss, like Spanish moss, and what was he thinking, where was he? "My medicine, Frank," she said. "You know how ill I am. You know I'm exhausted, mentally and physically, and that any, any"-her voice thickened, dredged with emotion-"upset, any cruelty or animosity is bound to, to . . . destroy me . . ."

He could only stare at her. He was utterly bewildered, adrift without oars or rudder, the seas piling and s.h.i.+fting beneath him. "I know it's difficult," he heard himself say, "but this heat won't last forever . . ."

"They have to go, Frank." Her voice was steady now, aimed true, homing on him. "Both of them."

For a moment the room was silent and he could hear the distant percussion of the axe on the chopping block, one of the workers splitting wood for the stove, and then the sudden harsh crackling shriek of a jay, so close it might have been in the room with them. He was grappling with the p.r.o.noun, third-person plural. Them?

"It's them or me, Frank. Them or me."

CHAPTER 5: THE LOVE BUNGALOW.

If that was how they wanted to play, rough and tumble, cats with their claws drawn, well, she could play at that game too. For three full days she lay in that sweltering room, in the dark, while Frank pleaded with her and the little half-witted housemaid who couldn't have been more than sixteen, ugly as a turnip and graceless and stupid into the bargain, brought her iced tea, lemonade and cakes. Plenty of time to brood, and brood she did. The gall of that crone, Mrs. Breen, that bag, that sack of bones with her lace-curtain Irish accent tripping around as if she were the lady of the house-and what had she had the effrontery to say in response to the simplest request for a salad properly dressed and a sandwich of cold chicken with a bit of mayonnaise and a slice of cheese that didn't stink of the barnyard? "I'm n.o.body's handmaid, ma'am, and if you want your victuals outside of the regular dining hours you'll just have to help yourself like anybody else." Victuals. Dining hours. It was all she could do to stop herself from s.n.a.t.c.hing the hearing trumpet out of the odious reptilian claw and snapping it over one knee.

And the mother. There was an old dragon crouching over her h.o.a.rd if ever she'd seen one. From the very instant they'd laid eyes on each other, in that exquisite living room with all of Frank's things on display as if it were a museum-and it was, it was a museum, as fine and profoundly moving as any in the world-there'd been a mutual antipathy. A chill. As if a wall of ice, a thousand-year-old glacier, had sprung up between them. Frank had escorted her into the room on his arm and before she'd had a chance to catch her breath-all that rare beauty-his mother was there like one of the risen dead, tall, bony, white-haired, with a scouring look in her eye and a mouth that clamped shut so tightly it was a wonder she had any teeth left. "Enchantee," Miriam had murmured, taking her hand, but the old woman said nothing in reply, merely looking to Frank and commenting, in the sort of tone she might have used while kicking the mud from her boots, "So this is the Parisian?" Only then did she look Miriam in the eye. "Or should I say, Parisian by way of Tennessee?"

Three days. To h.e.l.l with them. To h.e.l.l with everybody. She'd rather be back in Taos if it came to it, free of all this embroilment and animus, and she closed her eyes against the void of the ceiling and saw herself gamboling through a field of wildflowers in the cool pellucid sculptor's light of the high mountains, her arms outspread, the pure white silk dancing round her on the breeze. But Frank wasn't in Taos, Frank was here. This was his abode, his refuge, his poet's tower s.h.i.+ning out over the waste-land of boorishness and diminished taste, and her place was beside him. And he was concerned for her, she could see that, his face heavy, his voice soft and chagrined, the most caring man in the world. He must have come twenty times a day to inquire after her-Did she need anything? Was she feeling better? Wouldn't she like to come in to dinner?-and at night he let all his need spill over her.

In the darkness, as they lay there side by side, she praised him, praised his vision and his genius and the way his great and giving soul was reflected in the beams that rose over them and the holy s.p.a.ce he'd created within. She took his hand. Squeezed it. And gave praise, because praise was her main theme and her modus, but there was another theme here and it began to emerge even as his breathing slowed and the night wheeled overhead. "Frank," she whispered, "Frank, are you awake?"

s.n.a.t.c.hed from sleep, his voice thick: "I'm here."

"Your mother, Frank. And that dreadful housekeeper. I cannot"-her voice rising-"will not endure this sort of abuse much longer. Who is to be the mistress of this house? Tell me that, Frank. Tell me."

On the evening of the third day she emerged from her room in time for dinner, taking her place at the table beside Frank as if she'd been sitting there amongst them each night since the roof had been raised and the table brought in through the door. This time-and she didn't give a d.a.m.n whether anybody liked it or not-she entangled herself in the conversation, letting no point pa.s.s unchallenged, whether it had to do with politics, pasturage, Paris fas.h.i.+on or the weather, and she let them know, all of them, Frank's mother and his grown children, his adolescent boy with the open honest look Frank must once have worn in the long-ago, the draftsmen, the visiting architect and his wife and whoever else was there, that she was the equal of anyone and that from now on the entire establishment would dance to a new tune, her tune, hers and hers only.

She knew something they didn't. She knew that Nellie Breen would be sent packing within a matter of days, as soon as Frank could find someone to replace her, and that in the morning he'd be having a long talk with his mother, emphasizing the fact that her rooms weren't yet completed-why, the building itself-and wondering, especially with the season changing and the cold sure to come on soon, if she wouldn't find it more comfortable back in Oak Park. At least temporarily. And she knew that when she went back into that pinched and darkened room this time it would be only to pack her things up and direct the maid to take them across the courtyard, through the loggia and into Frank's rooms.

What she hadn't taken into account was the tenacity of Nellie Breen. Nellie Breen wouldn't go quietly because Nellie Breen was a fire-breather of the first stripe, a shallow crude vituperative woman who'd somehow gotten her claws into Frank and wasn't about to let go. There was a scene, Frank's voice raised against the high rasping complaint of the old woman cornered in the kitchen like a badger in its den so that everybody on the estate must have heard it and the pig farmer down the hill too, and Miriam, lying abed with a pot of coffee and a novel propped up on the shelf of her abdomen, felt her own blood beginning to rise. This was a servant, for Christ's sake, a n.o.body. Give her the boot, that was what she was thinking, have her physically removed from the premises, and why should Frank have to bother? Why shouldn't his estate manager108 take care of it? Or his mother? But then she checked herself-she wouldn't want her stepping into the line of succession, even for five minutes, even to do the dirty work.

"You're dismissed," she heard Frank shout suddenly, his voice echoing down the courtyard through the open kitchen window, in full roar. "Can't you understand that? You're no longer wanted. Period. Must I repeat myself over and over?" The old woman came right back at him, her words chopping through the dull haze of the morning like so many swirling blades: "You think you can just toss me out? Without cause? So you can lie here with your-" Frank's voice swelled to drown hers, there was a sharp tumbling explosion shot through with metallic tones, a clatter and tintinnabulation of cook pans, implements, perhaps even cutlery, and then the thunderous slamming of the door. In the next moment she saw him stalking across the courtyard, his shoulders clenched in fury, and she rushed to the window, her emotions surging-the b.i.t.c.h, the b.i.t.c.h, he was her hero, s.h.i.+ning and golden, couldn't the whole world see it?-and called his name as if her life depended on it.

He stopped in his tracks, spinning round to see where this new challenge was coming from. There was something about his posture, the shoulders, the fists, the gnomic big-headed stocky Welsh look of bellicosity, that brought her back to the scenes between them at 25 East Cedar Street before she'd gone off to New Mexico in capitulation, and that gave her pause. He was glaring at her, the compa.s.s of his fury expanding to include her now, as if she were to blame, and he cried out as if she'd just stuck a dart in his back. "What? What do you want from me?"

The moment was emblematic. She knew it, felt the knowledge run through her like a long s.h.i.+ver, but she was there at the open cas.e.m.e.nt, not fifty feet from him, and without thinking, she just opened her arms to him. "Frank," she crooned, drawing out the single syllable in the continental way-"Frahhnnk"-and she saw his face change. "Come here. Come to me."

In the next moment he was there at the window, reaching out to wrap his arms around her, rigid with the residue of his anger. "Good, Frank," she murmured, hugging him to her, and it was as if they were on a stage, because wasn't that his mother's face hanging in the window across from them? Yes. Yes. The ghost of an image, already fading. She gripped him, squeezed him, pressed him to her. "Good," she said. "Good for you."

Six weeks later, the scandal broke, and everything had to be recalibrated.