“That’s your B.O.P. Stetson, ma’am,” the man said, “the best. Stands for ‘Boss of the Plains.’”
She laughed. “Perfect.”
“It’ll run you more,” the vendor cautioned. “It’s twelve dollars.”
“I’ll take it.” She stuffed money into his hand.
Frank swooped up moments later in his yellow car and could barely conceal his delight. He put on the hat and drove them to the north side, to a tiny German restaurant. What a sight he made, dressed in a duster that hung down to his high boot heels, with the Stetson perched above his driving goggles.
Settled in a booth, she found he wanted to relive each scene from the film. She was amused by how boyish he was, sitting there with the big hat next to him, nearly in convulsions over the memory of desperadoes falling off their horses as Tom Mix chased them down.
SOMETIMES THEY DROVE OUT into the country, the yellow car ripping at terrifying speeds over rutted roads. They stopped along the way for whatever the stands were selling—strawberries, cantaloupe. Frank had a blanket in the car that he spread out, then he took off his shoes and wiggled his toes. “God, that feels good,” he said every single time he stripped off his socks.
He loved Whitman. He would lie on his stomach and read Leaves of Grass to her. There were long stretches, though, when they didn’t talk, just sat near each other. They could have hummed, she thought, and understood each other perfectly.
One day, after they had finished eating, Frank cleaned his hands in ditch water near where they sat, then produced from the car a portfolio full of Japanese woodblock prints. He spread the prints out carefully on the blanket.
“These are by Hiroshige,” he said, pointing to three of them. “Pictures of the floating world.”
She studied a print of a courtesan fanning herself. “I’ve never understood what that means—‘the floating world.’”
“They’re pictures of common people just living for the moment—going to the theater, making love. They’re floating along like leaves on a river, not worrying about money or what’s going to happen tomorrow.
“I bought these when I was in Japan,” he said, taking two landscapes from the portfolio. Mamah remembered Catherine Wright’s stories about that trip to Japan. She’d told of how Frank would leave every evening dressed as a local in a straw hat, disappearing with a translator into the back streets of Kyoto, on the prowl for prints.
“Nature is everything to the Japanese,” he said. “When they build a house, they face it toward the garden.”
“I knew Japan had influenced you,” she said. “I didn’t realize how much.” She thought she saw him flinch. “You don’t like the word ‘influenced,’ do you?”
“Hate it, actually. Beaux Arts snobs—the academics—use it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. But I want you to understand. Nobody’s influenced me. Why should I copy the Japanese or the Aztecs or anybody else when I can make something beautiful of my own? It all comes from here.” He tapped a finger on one temple. “And from nature.”
“I know that,” she said. She didn’t like the feeling of being chastised by Frank. “It was simply the wrong word.” Mamah turned back to the prints. “I love this one.” She looked closely at the picture of a courtesan reclining on a bed, reading a book.
“Then it’s yours.”
She was giddy when she took the print home that day. She put it between the pages of a large picture album where Edwin would never look.
WHEN CATHERINE INVITED MAMAH and Edwin over for dinner in early August, Mamah saw no recourse but to go. She had not seen Catherine in weeks. After dinner, with the men in the studio, the women settled into the living room. They talked about club news and their children and the books they were reading. At one point Catherine got up to retrieve a book from a shelf across the room.
“Did you ever see this?” she asked. She held a copy of The House Beautiful in her hands. “You know Reverend Gannett, don’t you? Frank illustrated his essays for this book. It must have been back in ’96,” she mused. “It was our bible in those days.”
Catherine paged through the book, reminiscing about the time early in their marriage when Frank was building their house. “He wanted to carve a saying over every doorway. I told him, ‘Just one.’ Don’t ask me where I got the gumption to put my foot down—you know Frank—but it worked. We were young and in love, and he went along with me.”
Mamah glanced at the familiar words over the fireplace. LIFE IS TRUTH.
“How did you meet Frank?” she asked impulsively, horrified at once by her own perverse curiosity.
“At a costume dance at his Uncle Jenk’s church on the south side,” Catherine said, “near where I grew up.” A smile spread across her face at the memory. “We were all dressed as characters from Les Miserables. Frank was dressed as an officer with epaulets and a sword. I was supposed to be a French maid. It was a reel, I guess, because when everyone changed partners, we just slammed right into each other. Knocked each other right to the floor.”
Catherine flipped to the back of the book. “There’s this one poem Reverend Gannett quotes, called ‘Togetherness,’ that is just so beautiful. It was written by a woman who only had eleven years with her husband before he died. Isn’t that sad? Here, you read it. I’m going to put out dessert.”
Mamah held the book on her lap. She could see herself from the outside, sitting in the same chair she had sat in many times before. The room hadn’t changed. Catherine hadn’t changed. It was she who had changed into someone who could assess in one cool glance the failings of her lover’s household.
She saw now that there was almost no trace of Catherine in the things of the house—every inch of the place was Frank’s eye, from the plaster frieze around the top of the room, depicting mythological kings and giants locked in battle, to the moss-colored velvet drapes on either side of the inglenook. But in the commotion of the house, the entrances and exits of children seeking out their mother, in the sounds of the house, there was no question who presided.
Mamah scanned the poem quickly to its last verse.
Together greet life’s solemn real,
Together own one glad ideal,
Together laugh, together ache,
And think one thought—“Each other’s sake,”
And hope one hope—in new-world weather,
To still go on, and go together.
“Tripe,” she muttered to herself.
Yet a nausea had taken hold of her belly by the time Catherine arrived with dessert, and she hurried Edwin out the door, pleading sickness.
In the early hours of the morning, she got out of bed and went to the kitchen in search of a cracker to settle her stomach. When she opened the cupboard, a small brown moth flew out. She knew what that meant. If she didn’t get rid of the flour and rice and cereal in the cabinet, if she waited until Wednesday, when the cleaning girl came, there would be two dozen moths hanging upside down from the shelves. She held up one bag of grain after another to the kitchen lightbulb, looking for tiny white larvae, tossing anything suspect into a garbage barrel. In the end, she dumped the entire contents of the cabinet, then filled a bowl with hot water and ammonia.
How has it come to this? she wondered as she scrubbed. She had always thought herself a deeply moral person. Not a prude, by any stretch, but someone decent. Honorable. She would no more underline in a library book than allow the butcher to return too much change. How had she come to a point where she could so easily tell herself that adultery with a friend’s husband was all right?
The next morning Mamah opened her diary for the first time since the previous winter. Thumbing through the fat little book, she understood why Lizzie and Edwin had been so worried about her. Through much of February, she had simply sat in bed, immobile and half stupid, staring out the bedroom window at the icicles hanging from the eaves.
Now, browsing through the diary, Mamah recognized her own inchoate yearnings in a notati
on to herself that she’d made while reading during the long winter.
It is not sufficient to be a mother: an oyster can be a mother. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
For as long as Mamah could remember, she had felt a longing inside for something she could not name. She had shoveled everything into that empty place—books, club committees, suffrage work, classes—but nothing filled it.
In college, and for a good period afterward in Port Huron, she’d had big ambitions. She had wanted to be a writer of substance, or maybe a translator of great works. But the years passed. She was nearing thirty when Edwin finally won her over. By the time she married him, she’d put those dreams to rest.
Back in Oak Park, living as a wife, she had done what all the women did: had children. She had truly wanted children—that was the main reason she’d married Ed. But there was a nanny now, and she had reverted to her old habit of retreating into herself, holing up to read and study. When she came out for a burst of socializing, everyone seemed pleased to see her. “Strong-minded” was a word she heard from time to time about herself. It meant brainy. But she heard “lovely,” too.
At the Nineteenth Century Woman’s Club, she’d occasionally throw an incendiary idea into a conversation. “If nurses get paid for their services, why can’t housewives?” Or, “Charlotte Gilman says factory women could have real careers if they lived in communes with shared kitchens and hired cooks and nurses for the children.”
The women liked her in spite of her provocations. They thought anyone with studious habits an eccentric, but she was married to Ed Cheney, after all—a splendid regular fellow. Or maybe they simply didn’t believe she was serious when she spoke out, for what had she done about all her talk?
Throughout the dark winter, she had berated herself from every angle—some days for being an unfit mother, other days for doing nothing more than mothering.
Look at Jane Addams, she wrote to herself, and Emma Goldman. Look at Grace Trout, the most ordinary of people, taking on the Illinois legislature for the vote. What is the matter with you?
Louise had come and gone during those weeks, bringing the baby in to see her as if nothing were wrong. By March, Mamah had begun to emerge from her melancholy. One of her first outings was to go hear Frank’s talk at the club.
Reading the diary, she wondered if he had seen her vulnerability as she saw it now. Was I simply low-hanging fruit—easy pickings?
When she met him next, she asked him outright. They were sitting in his car, parked on a side street on the south side.
“Mamah, something so good has begun here. Don’t rub the bloom off of it with talk like that. You can’t believe it’s wrong, can you?”
“Don’t ask me that. Ask me if I’m happy.”
“I know the answer to that already.”
SHE FELT ALMOST SWOLLEN with a joy that spilled over into every part of her life. She was taken aback by Martha’s sweet baby smell and her tiny, nearly translucent fingers. Mamah could play whole afternoons with John and his friend Ellis from next door, hiding behind bushes in the front yard while they hunted for her. She found herself baking cakes, loading the neighborhood kids into the car, and delivering food to people she knew who were ill or had new babies. Once, when Lizzie read to her about a delivery boy who had been injured when his horse collided with a car, Mamah tracked down the boy’s house to deliver an envelope with twenty dollars in it.
Edwin was deeply relieved by the change in her. He said she was more beautiful than ever. When his hand found her hip as they lay in bed, she didn’t turn away. She let him take his pleasure while her mind drifted elsewhere.
At the beginning of the summer, she had thought, It can’t last; it’s impossible. Nine children between us, never mind Catherine and Edwin. Mamah knew she would never leave her children. But to have something perfect, something utterly one’s own for a while…who would be the worse for it if they never found out? One lives but once in the world.
By the end of the summer, though, she admitted to him what she knew. She loved him with every cell in her body. She found delight in every part of him—his irrepressible laugh, the merry eyes that nearly always looked as if he’d just heard the most amusing punch line, his presence in every waking moment. She loved the way he impulsively brushed the back of his hand across her cheek at unexpected moments.
He made her feel alive and cherished. Rarely did he meet her without bringing some small surprise. He would hold his fist above her outstretched hand and tell her to close her eyes. When she opened them, she might find a foil-wrapped chocolate in her palm, or a small piece of bone from the wing of a bird, its lattice of cartilage stirring a conversation on aerodynamics.
She loved the flexibility of Frank’s mind—that he spent his days fitting together geometrical forms, yet could express himself eloquently in writing and play piano with heartfelt beauty. As for his extraordinary soul, one had only to look at the houses he designed to find it laid open for the world to see.
Mamah realized she cared for him for the very reasons he made other people squirm. He was fearlessly outspoken. And he was eccentric, but it was the kind of eccentricity she had come to admire in her father. Anyone as attuned as Frank was to nature’s order, anyone raised to reason outside the mainstream, was not going to be penned in very well by society’s rules. Her father had responded to the order of the natural world, too. He was more interested in the habits of wasps than the politics of Oak Park. He hadn’t cared a fig about fashion or the neighbors’ opinions about the goats he kept in their suburban backyard. He was a “one-er,” as he called stubborn nonconformists like himself, and he had nourished the same independence in his children.
Frank was like that. His ears and eyes and heart were tuned to seek truth in places where other people didn’t look. In this, and in so many other ways, she felt a kindred spirit to him.
BELOW THE DARK MUSINGS of the winter, she wrote the date in her diary.
August 20, 1907
I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.
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.