Loving Frank (21 page)

Maybe designing a villa in Fiesole had been only an exercise for him. Why had she expected the dream to be any more than that, a fantasy, given the odds against it? Now he said he was going back to his children, not Catherine. But how could he sustain that resolve in the face of so much opposition?

Mamah didn’t know if
she
could sustain it. If she returned right now, there was a good chance she would be sucked back into being Edwin Cheney’s wife. As much as she longed for her children, she knew if she got close to Oak Park, the work she had begun would be put aside.

Ellen had told Mamah about a friend in Berlin who could secure a teaching position for her if she chose to stay in Europe. There was no hope of finding a job in the United States in the wake of the scandal, and she would need one now. She counted the months she had been gone. Fourteen since she boarded the train to Boulder. If she could stay on the continent ten more months, she could get a divorce from Edwin even if he didn’t want one. By then it would be two years since she’d lived under the same roof with him.

Mamah would have to lean on Lizzie longer than she had expected. It was a lot to ask. Maybe she could manage to stay only until spring—another six months—but that might be enough.

When Frank came into the garden that morning, he sat across from her. “What will you do?” he asked. The skin below his eyes was brown and puffy.

“I’ve been thinking about that.” She looked out over the fog in the valley that was just beginning to burn off. “I’ve decided to stay over here, at least until spring.”

Frank stirred milk into his coffee and avoided her eyes. “But you haven’t got a friend here.”

“I’m going to ask Edwin to allow the children to come over. Louise could bring them.” She couldn’t keep her shoulders from sagging a little at the thought of the furor that idea would ignite back in Oak Park.

Frank crossed his arms and confronted her gaze. “I told you from the start I would only stay over here for a year.”

“I know that.”

“Why don’t you come back, take an apartment in Chicago?”

“Why don’t you say ‘I love you, Mamah.’?” Her voice quivered with anger. “Why don’t you say ‘Keep the faith. We will find a way.’? Why can’t you say that to me?”

Frank swept the back of his hand gently across her cheek. “Of course I love you. You know what I want for us. But what can I promise? I am going back nearly broke to a place where I am despised. And the worst of it? I’m worried sick about leaving you here unprotected. How will you fend for yourself?”

“Ellen says she knows people at a girls’ seminary school who will hire me to teach English.” Her infuriating frustration began to dissipate. “I’ll take more Swedish classes.” She tried to brighten her voice. “Once Ellen authorizes me to begin
The Woman Movement,
it has to come straight from the Swedish. I persuaded her I could do it, but it’s going to take total immersion.”

Mamah could tell her bravado was not fooling him. “I dread being alone over here,” she admitted. “But the truth is, I’m not ready to face the yellow press. When I go back, I shall be stronger, for everyone concerned.”

During breakfast they talked of their remaining weeks together. If they lived cheaply, they could make a quick tour through Austria and Germany, perhaps take up Wasmuth on his offer to arrange a meeting with the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt. On his way back to the States, Frank would stop in England to persuade his friend Ashbee to write an introduction to the volume of photographs Wasmuth was preparing. He would also take Mamah’s translations of
The Morality of Woman
and
Love and Ethics
back to his friend Ralph Seymour, to see if he’d publish them.

He talked about his plans to divide up the house on Forest Avenue. He would renovate his studio into living quarters for Catherine and the children, then eventually, rent out the other half so they would have a regular income in addition to what he gave them. It would take time to lay the groundwork. But it wouldn’t be long before he and Mamah could have a home of their own together, maybe in the city.

When Taylor knocked at the gate, Frank ushered him into the garden. Mamah greeted him, then stepped into the studio to fetch the rolled-up drawing of the villa. In the early-morning hours, she had covered it in the lily-patterned wrapping paper Frank had discarded the night before.

“May I give this to you for safekeeping, Taylor?” she asked, putting it into his hands.

He and Frank looked puzzled. “Of course,” Taylor said.

“A little memento of our time here in Italy.” She smiled at his earnest face. “Proof that we all didn’t dream it. If you hold it for me, Taylor, then I know I’ll see you again.”

CHAPTER
29

October 28, 1910

Ellen talks about living a “terrifyingly earnest life.” She says moral law is not written upon tablets of stone, but on tablets of flesh and blood. In one year I have traveled from Oak Park to Boulder, New York, Berlin, Paris, Leipzig, Florence, and back to Berlin. I’m tired. I don’t want to be anyone’s tablet of truth.

M
amah set aside her journal and readied herself to go out. Bundled in her coat, she tiptoed down the hall past the closed door of Frau Boehm, past the parlor crammed full of heavy, dark furniture that reeked of polish, and through the front door of the Pension Gottschalk. On the street, she wrapped a scarf around her neck against the October chill, walked to the end of the block, then turned north toward the Wilmersdorf district police station. Anyone staying longer than two weeks in Berlin was required to register with the police. She was late getting to it, and annoyed now at having to give over perhaps an hour to waiting in line.

“MAMA—” THE SERGEANT
tripped on her first name as he read from her passport.

“May-muh. It’s a difficult one, no matter what language,” she said.

He didn’t look up. “May-muh Borthwick Cheney. Oak Park, Illinois. U.S.A.”

“Yes.”

“Father’s full name?”

“Marcus S. Borthwick.”

“Occupation?”

“Do you mean my occupation?”

The man looked up at her through smudged glasses. “No, his.”

“Train repairman.”

“His place of birth?”

“New York.”

The sergeant straightened in his seat and rotated his shoulders, then slumped down again, drew on his cigarette. “Are you married?”

She swallowed. “Yes.”

“Husband’s full name?”

“Edwin H. Cheney.”

“Occupation?”

“President of an electric company.”

“Birthplace?”

“Mine?”

“His.”

Mamah felt her ears growing hot. “Illinois.”

The man’s eyebrows rose above the spectacles. “Is he with you?”

“No.”

“Your religion?”

“Why do you need to know that?”

The man looked up and frowned. “It is the law, madam.”

“Protestant.”

“Number of times in Germany?”

“Drei mal.”
Three times.

“Purpose of your visit?”

“To translate sex manuals,” she muttered in English. “To drive housewives to mayhem.”

“Eh?”

“Um zu studieren.”
To study.

“How long will you stay?”

“Three or four months.”

He handed over her passport. “You are free to go.”

Oh, Frank, where are you when I need you?
She would have made him laugh, telling him about the pompous sergeant. But there wasn’t anyone with whom to share a real conversation. Frank had been back in Oak Park for a month and had his own struggles, far worse than hers. His one letter had been short and devastating.
It’s official, my dear. Not a soul on my side. Friends cross the street rather than speak.

Standing on the steps of the police station, Mamah felt her enthusiasm for her list of chores draining. It could all wait. She dropped her letters to Frank and Lizzie at the post office, then headed back to the boardinghouse.

She had arrived at Pension Gottschalk thanks to Ellen, who knew the landlady. Frau Boehm was a well-heeled widow who gave generously to the Woman Movement. She was bighearted and bigheaded, with her hair rolled into heavy puffs over each ear, the sort of outspoken woman who might have been a colorful friend had their paths crossed back in Oak Park. But here in Berlin, there was a class distinction between landlady and boarder, especially since Mamah had chosen to rent a room on the top floor of the pension, the cheapest room in the house.

She suspected she was one of the landlady’s causes, that the woman fancied she was “harboring” her. And while Mamah offered no details of her personal life, she guessed Frau Boehm had gotten her personal history from Ellen Key.

At dinner the landlady sat at the end of the table, dressed in unfortunate copies of French gowns, with her great head floating like a dirigible above her shoulders. From time to time she paused midbite to pose discussion topics to her three female boarders. Is motherhood the right of every unmarried woman? Should girls be allowed to exercise naked at the gymnasiums? Mamah endured the dinners in silence. She had little money for food outside the fare that came with her room.

Except for the enforced intimacy at the pension, Mamah felt invisible in Berlin. She was grateful for the anonymity. Neither the professor of Swedish at the university, nor the headmistress at the girls’ seminary where she taught, knew her full story. She’d passed herself off as an unmarried American scholar when she applied for the teaching position. That she was a foreigner was far less troubling than that she was a married woman living apart from her husband.

When Frank left her in Berlin in September, Mamah had looked forward to the solitude ahead, because Ellen’s work required more than singleness of purpose. It required surrender. In Nancy, when she’d given herself over to
Love and Marriage,
she had come away from the book with her soul fed as it had never been fed before.

If she could lead other women to experience the same intense recognition she’d felt, if she could manage to make Ellen Key comprehensible to American women, who knew what might happen? Maybe a revolution in the Woman Movement. To tease from Swedish into English the delicate shadings of phrase and argument would take every drop of concentration she could squeeze from herself. Solitude was a requirement. More than anything, she wanted to feel again the calm confidence she’d felt in Nancy.

But what had been clear in September became fuzzy by October. After working six days a week at the girls’ seminary from seven in the morning to one in the afternoon, she often returned to her room to study Swedish until nine or ten at night. Translating some of
The Woman Movement,
Mamah discovered little of the excitement she’d found in other texts.

She was exhausted, distracted. And for the first time in months, she found herself questioning the trail of decisions that had led her to the tiny room at Pension Gottschalk. The longing for her children was almost too much to bear. At night she lay in bed, trying to recall the exact smell of Martha when she was a baby. What had it been? Lilac talcum? Milk on her breath? Mamah couldn’t conjure up the mix of smells she had so loved, but she could almost hear the sound of Martha’s chatter rippling down the hall from her crib.

And John at four. Coming in from outside, time and again, carrying his bug jar. “I am the daddy of this worm,” he’d announced once, then he’d taken it for a walk in his wagon. Another time he’d come up to her when she was standing in the living room, leaned in to her side, and said, “I love you as much as a bomb could explode.”

Awake at night in Berlin, she cried and laughed.

When sleep came, the children were in her dreams. The whorls of dark hair at the nape of John’s neck. The constellation of moles sprinkled across his back like the Little Dipper. She saw Martha’s small fingers wrapped around one of her own; the delicate indentation in her chin, the bottle-blue eyes. Regret filled her when she woke. Or sometimes terror. One night she saw John batting at a wasp’s nest while she looked down on him from a window she could not open. A particularly horrible nightmare came two nights in a row. John appeared to her and said, “A man is burying Martha in sand.” When Mamah tried to rise from her chair in the dream, her limbs wouldn’t move.

She began taking long walks, cutting through the zoological garden that lay like a wonderland between her pension and the heart of Berlin. She stood among the crowds of children in front of the animal cages, imagining John and Martha agog at the whimsical animal shelters where pelicans lived in a Japanese temple and antelopes in a Moorish house decorated with colorful majolica tiles.

When she wrote to Edwin begging him to allow Louise to bring the children for a visit, he responded with a swift no. His letter threw her into a downward spiral, but it was Lizzie’s letter in late September that put her at the bottom of a dark pit.

Dearest Mamah,

I write to you today with a hopeful heart that what I have to say will help you see the truth.

Frank Wright returned to Oak Park last week in his usual way, making a spectacle of himself. I am told he enlisted poor William Martin to collect him and his belongings at the train station, then came along Chicago Avenue like a politician on the 4th of July, waving his hat and calling out to anyone he saw on the street. It would almost be amusing were this family not part of the humiliating attention that has been stirred up by his return.

People who never spoke to me in the past about your situation have come forward recently. Did you know that when Frank Wright departed for Europe, he left Catherine Wright with a $900 grocery bill? I am told Catherine has been hounded by debt collectors of all kinds throughout his absence, including the sheriff. Now that he is back, the entire town believes Frank has returned to Catherine, because that is what he is telling people. Yet your letters give me no reason to believe you and he have parted ways. Can you possibly believe a man who behaves this way?

As for Edwin, he is mightily hurt. Yet I am convinced that if you saw your way back here, he would welcome you with open arms.

Contrary to what you wrote in your last letter, Mamah, people remember you for the good and kind person you are. They are more forgiving than you think.

Faithfully,
Lizzie

Returned from her outing to the police station, Mamah hung up her coat in the small wardrobe in her room and sat down at her desk. It was cold in the room and quiet except for the sound of a streetcar squealing around a corner.

She hadn’t known what to make of Lizzie’s letter. Frank had struggled financially in the past; it might be true about the grocery debt. But his money troubles never seemed to last, because work always came along. Now, though, he was trying to perform a miracle on a shoestring—restart his practice, get the portfolio printed—and he hadn’t had a new commission in a very long time.

The letter she had just mailed to Lizzie was as truthful as she could manage without admitting the gnawing doubts left by her sister’s words.

Dear Lizzie,

I cannot speak for Frank. I know him well enough to understand that his return in the manner you describe was the bravado of a man in great pain. His friends and clients have abandoned him. I deeply regret that you are suffering anew as a result of his return. Yet he is there because he is the sole provider for his family. Whatever his debts may be—I do not know of any “grocer’s bill,” but I suspect exaggeration in the remark made to you—he has returned to support his children out of loyalty and obligation.

And how can I not do the same, you may wonder. I struggle with this question throughout each day here. I cannot explain except to say that the pressing need continues to be that I be alone to study, to work as I can, to sort things out unaffected by Frank’s influence or, in truth, the influence of my own family. It is not a need that I welcome, but it does not go away.

This much I know: I
can
stay here because of you, my darling Liz. It would be impossible otherwise. This gift of time to strengthen myself away from judging eyes is the greatest of the many kindnesses you have showered upon me. I hold you to your word that you will wire me immediately if any emergency arises. I will be on the next ship. In the meantime, it is not lost upon me that my absence is an ongoing sadness for the children. You understand, as no one else seems to, that every day away from John and Martha is an arrow in my heart, knowing it is I who causes their pain. I know you are the one who sits with them as they compose their precious letters. I live for their arrival, and I thank you.

Your loving sister,
Mamah

In the letter to Lizzie, Mamah had revealed half her true situation. She was desperately lonely and nearly broke. She couldn’t afford decent stationery, using instead school paper cadged from the seminary to write the letter. She had holes in her shoes and would need a new pair by winter, though she hadn’t any idea where that money would come from. Thankfully, her winter things—two wool suits and a good coat—had held up. No one looking at her would guess her underwear was threadbare.

Living a spartan life was not so hard; Mamah embraced it. For the first time since Port Huron, she was self-reliant. She found pleasure in having a work schedule again, and in teaching the eager young women who wanted to be teachers themselves. Far more troubling than poverty were the panics that came over her in the morning when she woke to find herself in the rented room.

Then her heart tripped so madly that it frightened her. Had Frank gone back to Oak Park and realized how impossible their hopes were? Had he returned to the open arms of his children and regretted more deeply his absence? Mamah struggled to steady herself when the terror hit. She had doubted him two years earlier, when he’d obliged Catherine by giving her the year she’d asked for. But Frank had come back to Mamah then.