Loving Frank (22 page)

What assurances did she have that he would return to her this time? And if he didn’t, how could she fault him? She didn’t doubt that he loved her. She was certain he did. But he was human.

In her panics, she tallied the cost of what they had done. Two families ripped apart. The children hurt cruelly. Frank’s business wrecked. Her reputation so universally ruined that her prospects for self-support were nil if she returned. And all for what? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps it was already over with in Frank’s mind. Maybe he felt as Mamah was beginning to feel—that the price for their relationship was too dear to continue paying.

She didn’t blame Frank. This was a self-imposed exile.
Why did I feel so compelled to stay?

She got up from the desk, knelt beside the bed, and put her forehead down on the covers. She was not practiced at prayer anymore. The only word that came to mind was “please.”

For a long time she had believed that a gardener prayed when she dug a hole; that a carpenter prayed when he pounded a nail. Now that notion seemed the attitude of a naive and lucky person. In the past, it had felt wrong, given the tragedies in the world, to ask for her own problems to be solved. But she asked it now.

When a prayer came, she wasn’t surprised that it came as a poem, one she’d learned long ago.

If I stoop into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,

It is but for a time; I press God’s lamp

Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late

Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day.

Her knees were stiff when she finally stood up. She went back to her desk to write the one letter she’d been so reluctant to compose. Sentences appeared on the paper so fast it was as if they had been waiting inside her fingers to trail out.

Ellen Key, most beloved Lady,

I have meant for some time to write to you and tell you just how important you are in my life. Before I attended your lecture in Nancy, I had met you as a true friend on the printed page. In fact, you have been a greater influence on my life than any other person except for Frank Lloyd Wright. You cannot imagine the light your words shed on me during the dark days before I met you. I shall never forget the brightness of your torch, the warmth of your companionship, as I struggled to follow a path I had come to fear was mine alone.

In truth, I struggle even now. I don’t know if I have the strength required to pursue this path of living freely and openly with the one real love of my life. Just now I feel as if the price may be too terrible for everyone involved if I continue on in this direction. There is only one thing certain. Your words will light my way and help me find the path I should pursue.

Your loving disciple,
Mamah Bouton Borthwick
October 28, 1910

CHAPTER
30

O
n Monday morning, when the headmistress stopped her in the hall outside her classroom, she grabbed Mamah’s wrist.
The end of the ruse,
Mamah thought. Something in her demeanor had undoubtedly raised the woman’s suspicions. Butterflies fluttered around her stomach when the headmistress stared intently at her. “Do you belong to a church?” she asked.

Mamah took in a quick breath. “I—”

“Because if you don’t, my church could surely use your services. We send volunteers over to a doss-house in the Wedding District on Sunday afternoons.”

“What do you do there?” Mamah felt the tension ebb.

The headmistress shrugged. “What we can.”

“You need a translator?”

“Yes.” The woman’s voice warmed a degree. “To write letters. It’s factory workers, you know. Poor. They all have long-lost cousins in America. That’s where they want to go.” She laughed. “They think all their problems will be solved if they can just get over to Minnesota.”

ONE EGG.
A length of ribbon. An embroidered handkerchief.
Pfeffernüesse.
The items they brought were not gifts, Mamah realized, but barter for her services. By the middle of November, word was out on the street that there was an American woman at a doss-house in the neighborhood who would translate letters. The small lobby was usually full of people when she arrived. Whole families arrived together, debated over what to include in their letters, ate food they’d brought. The room smelled of cooked cabbage and soiled diapers. Small children toddled around, their noses running. Coughs hacked through the air.

All of them wanted their letters written in English, though they could have been understood in German by their recipients. It dawned on Mamah that many of these people couldn’t write in their own language and did not want to admit it. One woman would leave the table, and another would take her place. Often there was a girl of fourteen or fifteen in tow. During the first week, Mamah saw the pattern. These were the “domestics” who made any number of things possible for American women of a certain class: clean houses, meals, child care while they attended club meetings. The girls slept in attic bedrooms and sent home whatever they made.

“Wisconsin,” said the peasant woman who sat next to her daughter.

“Where in Wisconsin, Frau Westergren? Do you have the address?”

The woman took Mamah’s pen in her raw, knobby fingers and wrote out six letters. “R-A-C-I-N-E.”

“Is that all you have?” Mamah spoke in German. She’d just written a letter to the woman’s brother asking if her daughter might work in his house as a nanny or maid.

“Yes.”

“But you say you haven’t seen your brother in fifteen years. How do you know he’s alive? You can’t just send her over there without knowing.”

The woman pursed her lips. Mamah understood that she had stepped over a line. She examined the girl. All of fifteen, with a fifth-grade education, she was wan from her work as a spooler in a factory. The girl stared heavily at her lap. That a mother would catapult her only child two thousand miles across an ocean to the Wisconsin farm of a brother she didn’t know anymore was some measure of the woman’s desperation. Or hope.

“Then we shall send the letter to Mr. Adolph Westergren in Racine, Wisconsin,” Mamah said finally when it became apparent that the woman would not speak again. “Let’s just see what happens.”

The next day she asked the headmistress if she knew Frau Westergren. “Yes, I know which one she is,” she said. “And her daughter.” She shot Mamah a knowing look. “Illegitimate,” she said softly.

Mamah was ashamed she had thought ill of the mother. To have a love so great for her child that she would give her up—she was stunned by it. The girl was doomed to poverty in Germany. In America she stood a chance. She could reinvent herself.

MAMAH FELT BETTER
when she came home from the doss-house. It was comforting to help people fling their hopes out into the ether on the long chance that something good would come back. And it did sometimes. Relatives occasionally replied, offering to sponsor them. One man, a bricklayer, found a Catholic parish in Chicago willing to employ him in building their new church.

She came to look forward to Sundays. The fusty smell of the tenements grew on her, and the occasional drunk urinating in the gutter ceased to rattle her. She arrived in the Wedding District curious to see what the day held.

One Sunday afternoon Mamah came home so exhausted she fell into bed without eating dinner. When she woke, she found herself still dressed in her street clothes and realized she had slept for nearly twelve hours. She rose and went to the window. Dawn was just breaking, the sun pushing pink veins through a sky that wanted to rain. Watching the light come up, she felt oddly hopeful. She was sick to death of uncertainty, weary of fear and remorse.

She missed Frank. He wasn’t a perfect man, but she loved him so deeply, she hardly knew how her body contained it. Someday, she was almost certain, they would look back on all this and say,
Yes, it was harrowing, but it’s over, and we’re stronger for it.

There was another way it could unfold, though, and she forced herself to think of it. There were no guarantees. Frank might have already said goodbye to her. She could be drifting on an ice floe and just not know it yet.

What would she do if that were true? Edwin had not responded to her request for a divorce. If he would take her back, as Lizzie said, would she return to him? She tried to picture it, and she knew then and there that no matter how desperate she might be, she would never go back to Ed. That knowledge offered a strange comfort. She had left not only because of Frank but because her marriage had been all wrong.

Before Mamah came over to Germany, Mattie had said to her, “What will you do if Frank returns to his wife? You’ll have nothing.” But Mamah felt now that if that came to be, she had more than nothing. She had whatever it was inside herself that made her survive. The past few months had boiled her down to her very essence. All the rest, it seemed, had just floated away.

She had never believed, as Edwin did, that if a person simply acted happy, he would be happy. But it seemed futile to hang on to sorrow at this point. What good did it do anyone for her to continue grieving, as if it were the only proper emotion, given the situation?

Children need happy people around them.
That thought alone was reason enough to let go of all the misery she had held on to. She resolved then that, come hell or high water, she would have John and Martha with her when she went back—for as much time as she could negotiate, beg, or steal.

As Christmas approached, Mamah bought gifts for the children from the vendors who set up booths along the streets. She chose a set of miniature painted soldiers for John and a small sapphire ring for Martha, to match her eyes. Mamah packed these and a few other wrapped toys into a parcel that she posted in mid-November.

In December Frau Boehm erected a towering Christmas tree in the parlor and strung garlands of fir and gilded nutshells throughout the house. For three weeks the fragrance of pine punished Mamah’s emotions. On Christmas Day, when the inmates of Pension Gottschalk sat down to smoked goose, she excused herself. She slipped out the front door onto Schaper Strasse and walked a few blocks up Joachimstaler Strasse toward Kurfürstendamm and the Café des Westens, where the evening could be passed uncelebrated among the Jewish artists.

CHAPTER
31

O
n a small platform stage at Café des Westens, a costumed woman stood motionless with her head bent, a flute to her lips, waiting for the room to quiet. Every table of the smoke-filled café was occupied. A standing throng leaned against the poster-papered walls, holding glasses of beer.

Mamah turned to leave when she saw no table available, but a waiter appeared at that moment and escorted her to an empty chair. The four men at the table stood when she sat down, while the women acknowledged her with nods. The man next to her leaned intently toward Mamah. He was small, with a body tense as a coil about to spring. His round spectacles magnified intelligent eyes. “Wine?” he asked.

“Yes, thank you,” she said. He said something else to her, but she couldn’t understand it because of the noise in the room.

Mamah wasn’t sure what the performer’s costume was intended to portray. The woman wore black satin pantaloons that stopped at her delicate ankles, just above stylish feminine boots. A short matching jacket, wrapped around her like a kimono, was held closed by a wide belt covered in seashells. Her straight black hair was cut just below her jaw. The face—lovely, with eyes as dark as her hair—was eerily familiar.

“My wife the poet.” The man next to her cocked his head toward the stage. “Else Lasker-Schüler. Or Jussef, prince of Thebes, depending upon her mood. She enjoys fantasy.” He extended a hand. “Herwarth Walden,” he said.

“Mamah Borthwick.”

“American?”

“Yes.”

When the waiter asked for her dinner order, Mamah scanned the menu for some small item.

“Have the pheasant and cranberries,” Herwarth said. He turned to the waiter. “Red, give her the pheasant.” Mamah fingered the cloth purse in her lap. It would take nearly every cent in it to pay for such a dinner. The man was merely being friendly; still, his familiarity annoyed her. She began to speak, but the waiter dashed off as the shrill sound of the flute pierced the noise, and the room fell silent. The poet handed away the flute, then surveyed the crowd through the smoke.

“Farewell,” she announced. She paused, her eyes focused on the man who sat next to Mamah.

“‘But you never came with the evening,’” she began, “‘I sat in a cape of stars.’”

Mamah shifted uneasily in her seat.

“‘When I heard someone knocking,’” the woman said, her voice hoarse with a gravelly despair, “‘it was my own heart.

“‘Now it hangs on every door post, even yours—among ferns a burnt-out fire-rose in garland brown.

For you I stained heaven blackberry with my own heart’s blood.

But you never came with the evening—

I stood in golden shoes.’”

The intimacy of the woman’s words, so clearly directed at her husband, created in Mamah a profound urge to get out of the room. “Excuse me,” she said as she got up and pushed past people clapping and shouting, “Jussef! Jussef!” She navigated her way through the crowd and stepped out onto the sidewalk, where the air hit her face like a cold cloth on sunburned skin. She wanted to leave but realized she’d foolishly left her wrap slung over the back of her chair. She would have to wade back in, pay the waiter, then plead illness to her tablemates just so she could retrieve her coat and be gone.

“Slumming tonight, are we?” a voice said.

Mamah almost jumped when she saw the poet standing not two feet from her on the sidewalk, her red mouth turned downward.

“I know you,” Mamah said.

“A lot of people know me.”

“You helped me one day—the only other time I was at this café. I had just gotten word that my friend had died, and…”

The woman stepped back and stared at Mamah’s face. “And you fell over, is what you did. I wondered whatever happened to you. You cried and cried.” She put an arm around her and patted her shoulder.

“Thank you for that day,” Mamah said. “I don’t know if I said it then.”

The woman took a cigarette packet from beneath the shell belt. Into her palm she emptied its contents—two cigarettes and one chocolate cookie. “Choose,” she said.

Mamah took a cigarette.

“Call me Else.” She struck a match. “What is a well-dressed American woman doing loose on the streets of Berlin on Christmas night? You look nothing like the other strays we get here at Café Megalomania.”

“My name is Mamah Borthwick.”

“You speak fine German, Mamah Borthwick.”

“Thank you. I’m here to study languages for a while—Swedish, actually. I am Ellen Key’s American translator.” Mamah instantly regretted the pretension in the remark. “I am waiting here until I can obtain a divorce from my husband.” Now she regretted spilling such personal information.

“Well.” Else raised her eyebrows and flicked a bit of tobacco from her finger. “Where are you from?”

“Chicago.”

“Chicago! I have a sister there!”

Else took her hand and led her back to the table. “Dearest Moderns,” she addressed the group, “we have among us a new friend. This is Mamah Borthwick of Chicago. She is the English translator for Ellen Key.”

“To free sex!” one of the women shouted, lifting her glass.

“These are my playmates.” Else went around the table. “Hedwig, Minn the Warrior, Lucretia Borzia, Little Kurt, Martha the Sorceress, and Caius-Maius the Emperor.” She paused. “And my husband, whom you appear to have met.”

“Let her eat her pheasant,” Herwarth said, his voice sour. “It’s already cold.”

Else pulled up a chair next to Mamah. “Oh, I love cold pheasant,” she said.

Sharing her plate, Mamah listened as the group talked about which artists might show their work at Herwarth’s new gallery when it opened. Mamah had heard of some of them and had actually seen the canvases of others. It seemed Herwarth was the editor of
Der Sturm
as well. She had read the weekly a couple of times since she’d been back in Berlin. In fact, she had relished his editorials, in which he picked fights with the kaiser over his antediluvian taste in art. As Mamah followed her tablemates’ conversation, it dawned on her that she was sitting very near the center of the German Modernist movement.

“Does this talk bore you?” Else asked her at one point.

“Not at all. I’m very interested in modern art.”

“Then you’ve come to the right place. Modernists, Expressionists, Secessionists. Cubists. Berlin is full of ‘-ists.’ Writers and painters flock here and pollinate each other. Quite literally.” She flicked her head toward a couple in the corner, where a man held a pretty young woman’s hand as if it were a small bird. “He’s probably seducing her with Rudolph Steiner quotes right now.”

Mamah leaned back in her chair and laughed. “Ah, it’s such a relief.”

“What is that?”

“To laugh. To be among people who are irreverent. I come from a different kind of place.”

“Isn’t Chicago cosmopolitan?”

“I’m speaking of a village I come from which is near Chicago. And yes, there are artists in Chicago who believe the same thing these people do, that art is going to save the world. It’s the architects who are the Moderns over there. They call themselves the Chicago School. They’re tossing up buildings that would take your breath away. The best is Frank Lloyd Wright.”

The poet assessed her. “Is he like Olbrich or Adolf Loos?”

“He’s like no one else.”

Else questioned her. In small pieces, Mamah let go of the truth, relieved to be opening up to someone who did not judge.

WHEN SHE RETURNED
to the café a couple of days later, Mamah took a table near the window. She glanced toward the corner, where two of the men she’d met on Christmas night were huddled over their playing cards. They nodded when they spotted her. The waiter with the copper-colored hair delivered her tea, then presented a copy of
Der Sturm
with a friendly little flourish.

Was it her imagination, or had something changed in the space of two days? Because she certainly felt a difference. Even now people walking through the door acknowledged her.

She suspected Else’s sudden friendship had stamped her as “approved” among the artists. Mamah was amused by it. Back in Chicago, no one had heard of Ellen Key. Her name wouldn’t have bought Mamah a cup of coffee. Here at Café des Westens, it was her passport.

Outside the window, scores of office girls walked by arm in arm. Military men in epaulets passed, along with hordes of others: fresh-faced farm boys turned factory workers carrying tin lunch pails; businessmen in homburg hats; gray-braided grandmothers in black dresses; nurses, shopgirls, society women out for tea. And then a woman like none of the others emerged from the crowd and stepped into the café.

“You sit down in this café, and the devil has you,” Else huffed as she took a chair across from Mamah. She was wearing a purple cape. Scattered over it were cameo pins with tiny photographs of faces inside each one.

“Your family?” Mamah asked, pointing toward a picture of an old-fashioned couple.

“Oh, no. I found them in a pawnshop. They were all begging to get out of the place.” Else ordered coffee, and when it came, she said, “I come from a village like yours. I was married to a doctor.” She pressed her coffee cup against her cheek to warm it. “I had fine china. Lovely rugs on the floor.” The serious brown eyes were flecked with gold. “One day I woke up and thought,
What have you done with your gifts? You’ve traded them for furniture.
” She moved the cup to the other cheek. “As you can see, I joined a different tribe. I have almost no furniture now, by the way. I owe the morning waiter and the midnight waiter, and I’m wondering how I’ll pay the rent now that Herwarth’s going. Still…” Her voice trailed off.

“Where is your husband going?”

Else put down the cup and looked away. When she turned back, her eyes were narrowed. “This is what I know of you, Mamah Borthwick of Chicago. You are a translator for Ellen Key’s sex philosophies. And you have left your husband for an artistic lover. Yet you live among the bourgeoisie here in Berlin. You’re a puzzle to me.”

Mamah stiffened as if she’d just discovered someone snooping around in her drawers. She crossed her arms. “My room is the cheapest one in the pension,” she said.

“You don’t have to defend yourself.”

Mamah felt embarrassed. “I admire the way you inhabit your life. You don’t seem to care whether other people approve.”

Else shrugged. “We all have our little battles going on inside.” That thought seemed to spark something, because she jumped up from her seat. “Work to do,” she said, then drifted off to her own table. She took out a notebook and began writing.

DURING THE WEEK
of her holiday that followed, Mamah returned to the café every day. She had always loved the smell of coffee in the morning, and the aroma in the café did not disappoint. The place was nearly empty when she arrived, and the hard morning light revealed it to be a tawdry mess. The bust of the kaiser still leaned drunkenly on top of the battered phone booth. The edges of posters curled up at their corners on walls dirty with fingerprints. But the round marble tabletops were cleaned of beer-glass rings by eight
A.M
., when Mamah happily settled at a table near the front window.

She wrote postcards to her children and translated until people filtered in. Sometimes a new friend would sit with her for a few minutes to chat, but mostly, the regulars drank coffee behind their newspapers. It was when the poets and writers began arriving around lunchtime that the place filled up with laughter, arguments, ideas.

Else got there by two in the afternoon and settled at her own table in a back corner, where she held court when she wasn’t writing. Most days she brought her son, Paul, a boy of four who seemed content to color in a book across from her. Mamah was touched by the two of them huddled together.

“He’s left her,” the woman named Hedwig said to Mamah one afternoon, glancing over at Else.

“Herwarth?”

“Yes, he moved out. There’s a Swedish woman, someone said.”

Mamah was stricken almost sick by the statement.

“Herwarth has been good to the boy, but he hasn’t any obligation, really. He’s not his father,” Hedwig said. “Else claims the father is a sheik or something.”