1908  

CHAPTER 6

“There’s something strange going on here,” Lizzie said. It was a glorious October morning, a Saturday, and she was standing at the stove while the edge of an egg curled to a brown ruffle in bacon grease.

Mamah glanced up from the newspaper. “What do you mean?” She felt cords in her stomach knotting up.

“It’s on page three, I think. There are men going door-to-door selling fake creamery butter. Right here in Oak Park. Did you see that?”

Mamah’s shoulders relaxed. “No.”

“We need to tell Louise when she comes on Monday so she doesn’t open the door.”

“What are you doing today?”

“Taking Jessica to a movie,” Lizzie said, flipping the egg.

“You’re a peach, Liz.” They had all taken on the girl after Jessie’s death, but it was Lizzie who truly mothered her.

“Do you want to come?”

“No. I’m headed down to the university this afternoon.”

Mamah didn’t even blink now when she lied. Deception came easily; it was almost routine. Frank would be waiting for her at his office, perhaps with flowers he had bought, or tea and sandwiches brought in from a restaurant.

“Robert Herrick is giving a special program on the New Woman,” she said to Lizzie. “Edwin’s taking the kids to the zoo.”

         

“CATHERINE KNOWS,” Frank said. They were lying on the carpet. Mamah could hear a violinist playing scales somewhere.

She sat up and looked at him. His eyes were closed. “That’s why you’re quiet.”

“She won’t say how she found out.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her the truth. I asked for a divorce.”

Mamah took his hand in hers and squeezed it. This was bound to come. She reached for her camisole on the floor nearby.

“Don’t get up yet,” he said. “Stay with me here.”

The room was bright and cool. She pulled a folded mover’s quilt off the top of a crate close by, covering the length of her body with it. Goose bumps coursed up and down her arms and legs.

“Catherine will keep it quiet,” he said grimly. “She’s too proud to tell anyone.”

Mamah imagined Catherine sobbing. Catherine hurling The House Beautiful at her husband’s head. Catherine climbing a ladder with a hammer and smashing the lovely figures in the living room frieze. It chilled her to think of what Catherine might want to do to her—a woman she had considered a friend.

Mamah cringed at the thought of the betrayal. But I didn’t steal Frank, she reasoned. His marriage had been bad for so long, it was possible he’d been intimate with other women before her. She had never pressed him on it because she hadn’t wanted to know. Yet that possibility conferred a strange solace just now.

“I’ll tell Edwin,” she said.

In the past couple of months, she and Frank had talked of simply coming out with it, asking for divorces. It was what both of them wanted, to live honestly. People got divorced these days; it wasn’t unheard-of. Sitting in restaurants, walking along Lake Michigan, driving in the country, they had talked of ways it could work, how they could live in Chicago and she could have her children with her somehow. If Edwin agreed, if Catherine agreed…

She had rehearsed the speech she would deliver to Edwin a dozen times. But now that the time was here, she couldn’t stop herself from shaking.

Standing up and moving around made her feel more resolute. She dressed, then leaned on the edge of the desk, rubbing her arms. “In a way, I’m relieved,” she said after a time. Her fingers worked her dark hair into a knot. “We won’t have to carry on this charade anymore.”

Frank lay with his eyes closed, massaging his temples. After a while, he stood up, his face solemn as he slowly pulled on his clothes. His back was still youthful, not muscled so much as broad for his small frame, and taut, like the back of a strong swimmer.

“She wants a year to see if we can repair it. If it doesn’t work, she’ll give me a divorce.”

Mamah stared at him.

“I know. I know. It’s absurd.”

“What did you say?”

“I said yes.”

Mamah’s body started reflexively. “But we agreed when this came—”

“I know what we agreed, Mame. You know how I feel about this. But Catherine…” He shrugged and shook his head. “Her heels are dug in. She’s fighting for her life. What choice do I have but to wait it out?”

Mamah felt her head wagging, half confused, half angry. Frank put an arm around her back and pulled her face into his neck with the other hand. They stood like that for long minutes, a chasm of silence between them.

In the interminable hours following that afternoon at the Fine Arts Building, she hung suspended in the house on East Avenue, waiting for a telephone call or a note or something. But no word came.

She began to drive around, looking at building sites she knew were his, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. When she heard Frank had finally begun the big house he’d been planning in Hyde Park, she drove to it, parked her car, and waited. After four hours of watching for his yellow auto to appear, she gave up and returned to Oak Park.

On two different nights, coming home from concerts at the opera house after midnight, Edwin and Mamah drove past Frank’s Forest Avenue house. Both times his studio was brightly lit. He’s thrown himself into his work, she told herself.

         

AS WEEKS PASSED and no word came, Mamah grew more perplexed. She had demanded nothing of Frank when they had last spoken, and he had promised her nothing. In a begrudging way, she admired his sense of honor in abiding by his agreement with Catherine; he could walk away with some shred of integrity. But other times Mamah felt frantic from uncertainty. How can he stay away, she wondered, when I can hardly stop myself from charging through his studio door? How does he manage to keep his promise?

Sometimes her head was so fogged she couldn’t concentrate on anything. She would find her son, John, standing in front of her, patiently saying, “Mama…Mama…Mama,” tugging at her dress, trying to get her attention so he could tell her something. In those moments, when she woke up to the skinny green-eyed boy in front of her, she was seized with remorse, grabbing him into her arms.

Still, she didn’t look back and regret what she and Frank had done together. It was the truest love she’d known with a man. But what was their relationship now? More and more in the quiet hours of the day, a fear asserted itself. He has returned to Catherine.

         

NEARLY A YEAR EARLIER, she had agreed to give a presentation on The Taming of the Shrew at the Nineteenth Century Woman’s Club. As December approached, she wondered what had possessed her to choose that play, of all things.

That was when I was living dangerously, she thought. She had been full of herself, full of indignation about the limits society pressed on women, confident in the rightness of her relationship with Frank, almost daring the world to discover their secret. Now she was hiding in her house most of the time.

A year ago, when she chose Kate’s speech on a wife’s obedience to her husband, she had imagined a flamboyant, ironic reading, after which she would talk about the changing role of women. Now, as she read the line “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,” she wanted to be in China, Budapest, Africa, anywhere but Oak Park, Illinois.

When the day came, she delivered the reading as she had first imagined it—with great irony—and nearly collapsed with relief when the audience laughed its approval. Strung through her like a thin wire, a streak of old courage had kept her upright long enough to get through it. Catherine had stayed away, but Frank’s mother had come. Mamah caught a glimpse of the frowning Anna Wright in the audience and wondered if she knew. Or if anyone knew, for that matter.

The harrowing reading, in the end, seemed to help her turn a corner. She returned to two classes she had begun in the fall at the University of Chicago, both taught by Robert Herrick—a literature class and a course on the writing of novels. She immersed herself in Herrick’s novels, attended classes, and wrote furiously.

The gnawing longing she’d felt for Frank was still there, but an uneasiness now matched it. How could she have been so ready to divorce her husband while Frank was so ready to give his wife one more year? She found herself thankful she hadn’t told Edwin.

On New Year’s Day, she woke to find her husband standing in his striped pajamas at the side of the bed, the thin hair around his ears ruffled like feathers. He bent to kiss her forehead. “Happy 1909, my darling.”

Mamah sat up, rubbed her eyes. “Happy New Year,” she said groggily.

He pressed into her hands a small wrapped gift. “I couldn’t resist.”

She opened it to find a gold brooch in the shape of an owl, with two rubies for its eyes.

Years earlier, he had given her a chain with a silver owl pendant on it. For my scholar, the note had read. She’d made the mistake of mustering delight, and subsequent owl gifts had followed—-a hooked rug, a carved owl clock, always with a sentimental note.

He had as much acquaintance with the contents of the books she read as she had with the workings of electric transformers. Yet he clearly felt enlarged by the idea that his wife was an intellectual. At dinner parties, he would sometimes direct the conversation toward her, graciously giving her the floor when he knew she had one of her causes to put forth. If talk turned bookish, he stared at her indulgently as she spoke, his forefinger crooked over his chin. When a guest once teased him about his silence during a discussion of an Ibsen play, Edwin had shrugged it off with characteristic modesty. “Mamah tends to Mr. Ibsen in this household. I take care of the car.”

“He adores you,” the woman seated next to her had said that evening. “You are a very fortunate woman.”

“Thank you, Ed,” Mamah said now, placing the lid back on the little box. She stretched her arms. “Is that sausage I smell?”

“’Tis. And eggs. And broiled grapefruit with brown sugar.”

“Where are the children?”

“Down in the basement with Lizzie.”

“All right. I’m up,” she said.

Mamah climbed out of bed, wrapped herself in a robe, and walked into the living room.

“Martha! Johnny! Jessica!” Edwin was hollering from the kitchen.

“Here we come,” John called from downstairs.

Mamah corraled Martha, who was toddling happily through the room, and sat her apple-cheeked daughter in the high chair. John came next, then Jessica, who sat patiently waiting for the clamor to end. Even at eight and never having known her own mother, the girl was the picture of composure, so like Jessie it was a bit unnerving.

Louise was off, as was the cook, and Lizzie was joining friends at church. Mamah relished having just the five of them together. After breakfast there would be baths, and games, and dinner to think about later. It would give shape to the day. So many days had been shapeless lately.

She didn’t believe in making resolutions on January first, and she hadn’t uttered a real prayer for a long time. But she found herself grateful to be present at the table. It will be all right, she thought.

         

IN THE AFTERNOON, with Martha down for a nap and John playing next door, she put her feet up to peruse the events calendar in the Oak Leaves. When she spotted the notice WRIGHT TO SPEAK ON THE ART OF THE MACHINE, she felt a tingling all over. Her eyes flew down the column, searching for the location of his talk. She stood up in agitation then. Goddamn you, Frank. I can’t even read the paper.

Already she could feel the old cloud filling up her head.