Loving Frank (14 page)

CHAPTER
21

“
I
can never go back now.” Mamah’s face was bloated from crying.

“You can and you will. This thing will blow over.”

“No,” she said, “I’m dead.”

“You’re not making sense.”

Frank left the suite then, and when he returned, he brought soup and a bottle of wine from a restaurant on the block. Mamah didn’t eat. Instead, she stared out the window at the leafless trees and drank the wine. After some time, he helped her up and put her to bed. When he left the room, she went to her suitcase and pulled out a bottle of cough syrup. She drank some, then put it beneath the mattress.

Frank was gone when she woke the next day. Mamah got up and stood at the door to the hotel room, listening for his footsteps. Then she went to the table and read the clippings again.

MRS. WRIGHT’S FAITH UNSHAKEN.

“My heart is with him now,” Mrs. Wright said to a reporter for the
Tribune
yesterday. “He will come back as soon as he can. I have a faith in Frank Wright that passeth understanding, perhaps, but I know him as no one else knows him. In this instance he is as innocent of real wrongdoing as I am….

“It appears like any ordinary mundane affair, with the trappings of what is low and vulgar. But there is nothing of that sort about Frank Wright. He is honest and sincere. I know him. I tell you I know him. I have fought side by side with him. My heart is with him now. I feel certain that he will come back. When, I don’t know. It will be when he has reached a certain decision with himself.”

Mamah could almost see Catherine standing at the door, her golden-red hair twisted in a Gibson Girl chignon. She was a handsome, dignified-looking woman.

“The world cannot possibly understand all that is involved in this affair. Is it not enough to know that I shall take no action for divorce, that I shall make no appeal whatever to the courts, that I stand by my husband right at this moment? I am his wife. He loves his children tenderly now and has the greatest anxiety for their welfare. He will come back to them and live down the publicity to conquer in the end. They can heap everything they wish to on me and I will bear it willingly and my place will remain here in his home.”

Frank had been wrong about Catherine. She had talked after all. Mamah imagined the reporter telling her, “This is your chance to tell your side of it.” Reading down the column, Mamah’s eyes found Catherine’s pain again and again.

“His whole life has been a struggle. When he came here as a young architect he had to fight against every existing idea in architecture. He did fight, year after year, against obstacles that would have downed an ordinary man…. He has fought the most tremendous battles. He is fighting one now and I know he will win. I have fought it beside him and the struggle has made me. Whatever I am as a woman, aside from my good birth, I owe to the example of my husband…. There should not be the same moral gateway for all of us.”

Mamah retrieved the cough syrup and swigged from the bottle. Her eyes fell on the small headline she had seen the night before that caused her to fall back against the pillows.

“SIMPLY A CASE OF A VAMPIRE.”

“We have six children. The oldest boy is 19 and he is home from college now. They worship their father and love their mother. If I only could protect them now I would care for nothing else. With regard to Mrs. Cheney, I have nothing to say. I have striven to put her out of my thoughts in connection with the situation. It is simply a force against which we have had to contend. I have never felt that I breathed the same air with her. It was simply a case of a vampire—you have heard of such things.”

Mamah climbed into bed. She felt a shame more sickening than anything she had ever known or imagined.

Catherine. Edwin. Lizzie. What horrors had they been subjected to? She imagined Edwin’s humiliation at being portrayed as a cuckold. And Lizzie, who had spent most of her life trying not to be noticed, what hell had been visited upon her? One headline had said, simply,
MRS. CHENEY’S SISTER IN CHARGE
.

It was John she thought of most. Martha wouldn’t understand what was going on, but John would know something was terribly amiss; he would be suffering now.

The hands of a small clock on the side table approached the nine o’clock hour. She counted the clock’s ticks, waiting for the medicine to dull the terrible ache in her chest. And she thanked God that her parents were dead, especially her mother.

Mamah thought of the day she had bought the cough syrup. Sitting in St. Hedwig’s Church, she had picked up a pamphlet on the pew and read about the church’s namesake. The saint had worn a hair shirt and slept on the floor, the usual sorts of mortifications. But Hedwig had her own specialties. She surrounded herself with beggars when she traveled—thirteen of them, always thirteen—whose sole purpose was to have their feet washed by her at the end of the day. Good luck for Hedwig was coming upon a leper who allowed her to kiss his ulcers.

A madwoman, Mamah had thought at the time. Now she would welcome the chance to kiss a leper’s sores if it meant she could undo the headlines.

Mamah lifted the clipping with her picture in it.

CHENEY CHAMPION OF RUNAWAY WIFE

O
AK
P
ARK
M
AN
H
AS
N
O
B
LAME

FOR
W
OMAN
W
HO
E
LOPED

WITH
F
RANK
L. W
RIGHT.

CABLES MAY HALT THEM.

F
RIENDS
H
OPE TO
I
NTERCEPT

“S
OUL
M
ATES”
B
EFORE
T
HEY
G
ET

ON
W
AY TO
J
APAN.

A new phase of the Wright-Cheney “spiritual hegira” developed yesterday when the husband…

They had bushwhacked Edwin at Wagner Electric.

“Mrs. Cheney has been getting the worst end of this deal right along, and it is not fair,” he said. “Those of her friends who understand the situation know that she should not be blamed in the way she has been…. We would all be grateful if the matter were allowed to drop now. With reference to divorce proceedings or any course I may see fit to pursue in the future I have nothing to say.”

Edwin,
she thought.
Loyal Edwin.

Friends said Mr. Cheney for more than a year had suspected Wright, but that family relations had been such that an out-and-out breach would occasion gossip and for that reason he held his peace. Mrs. Cheney has been known to her friends as of a highly temperamental disposition, capricious, and sentimental to a degree. She was a graduate of Ann Arbor and had strong literary inclinations. Mrs. Cheney’s sister, who teaches school, lives with them. There is a nursery governess for the two children. Mrs. Cheney is said to have spent little time with them.

Mamah lay flat on the bed.
Mrs. Cheney is said to have spent little time with them.

Floating pictures of Martha passed across her closed eyes. She saw her at nine months old, with fat tiny feet. She was climbing up Mamah’s body as if it were a mountain. She planted a foot on her mother’s hip, then pushed herself upward, clutching Mamah’s nightgown as she ascended. Up she came, crawling over her belly, then scaling her breasts until she was face-to-face with her mother. The startling blue eyes. Laughs and merriment. The smell of talcum.

A squeaking door hinge roused her.

“You can’t hide in there forever.” Frank was standing beside the bed. He looked vibrant, almost in good humor.

“Someone has been watching us.”

“The Medusa speaks.” Frank set down the food he had brought, another bowl of soup. “Eat this. We’ll talk when it’s down your gullet.”

Mamah tipped the bowl and drank the broth. “Everything is lost.” Her own voice was dull and faraway.