Loving Frank (23 page)

When Mamah looked over again, she was seared by the pained little society in the corner.

As the afternoon wore on, she listened to the people around her. Liebermann, Kokoschka, Franz Marc, Kandinsky—the names rolled off their tongues like a litany of Secessionist saints. When the day grew dark, Red circulated through the café lighting candles. “The world is changing,” someone said. “It is, it is,” the others agreed.

The room grew blue from smoke and pulsed with excitement by four, as people ordered bottles of wine and beer. They talked of Italian Futurism, of Gaudi in Barcelona, of mathematics as “the way God thinks.” They talked of who was sleeping with whom, of politics, war, magic, socialism.

One evening Mamah joined a table where Else was holding forth to a group of fellow artists. “That’s your sacred office,” she was saying heatedly. Her son was nowhere in sight. “To continue the act of creation where God left off on the last day. To unlock the secret language of nature. I truly believe that every time I go deep enough to bring back a nugget of truth or beauty, God is making use of me.” Else looked around at her tablemates. “Artists can redeem the world. But we can’t tarry, my friends. You and I are the salvation of this country, not the generals.”

Mamah drank in the pleasure of the words around her, the camaraderie. She had two glasses of wine that night, then another, and felt as if she had never been so comfortable among a group of people. She had arrived in Berlin from someplace else where she felt she didn’t belong, just as they had.

The night before Mamah was to return to work, a snowstorm blanketed Berlin. She woke to the news that whole sections of the city were without power and that her school had been closed for the day. She bundled up and went out to a newsstand. With a paper under her arm, she moved on to the post office, which she found open, though eerily empty. In her box, one envelope waited. The letterhead belonged to a Chicago law firm she knew to be the one used by Wagner Electric. Inside, she found what she expected. Edwin Cheney was suing Mamah Borthwick Cheney for divorce.
Grounds for Suit: Desertion.

She put the letter in her handbag and walked back toward the pension. It didn’t seem quite real that a major piece of her future had just fallen into place. She wanted to tell Else, but when Mamah looked in at the café, she saw that the place had only one other patron in it. She sat down at her table near the window and stared out at the street.

“I love a good snowstorm,” Red said to her when he brought a newspaper and a cup of coffee. “Stops people in their tracks.”

At the top of the front page, she saw the familiar words that Red stamped every morning on every newspaper that came into the place—
STOLEN FROM CAFÉ DES WESTENS
. She took a pencil from her handbag and wrote a note to Frank in the small section of empty white space at the top of the page.

January 10, 1911

It’s official. Got divorce notice today.

Loving you, Mamah.

“Is there an envelope anywhere around?” she asked Red, ripping her note off the top of the newspaper.

When he brought her one, she addressed it, slipped the folded note in, and sealed the envelope, then headed back out into the snow toward the post office.

CHAPTER
32

“
T
here’s a man downstairs to see you.”

Mamah looked over her eyeglasses at Frau Boehm, who rarely made the climb to the third floor. “Who is it?”

“A Mr. Wright.”

Mamah leaped up from her chair and raced past the startled woman, taking the steps two at a time.

Frank was standing in the parlor in an overcoat, his hat in his hands.

“You didn’t tell me!” She threw her arms around him.

“I thought if I did, you would say not to come.”

She put her hands on his cold face. “You look as if you walked from Chicago. Have you had any sleep in the past ten days?”

“Not to speak of.”

“Seasickness?”

His nostrils flared at the word. “Don’t remind me.” He took her hand. “I got a room,” he said softly. “At a little hotel not far from here.”

“I’ll get a bag,” she said, grinning like a madwoman. “It will take me five minutes.”

They walked through the Tiergarten on the way to the hotel. Frank was sober, his wicked wit nowhere in evidence. He had come to surprise Wasmuth, he told her, who had stopped printing the portfolio because of a disagreement between them. “The printing of the photo book is terrible, and he has misidentified at least two of the buildings on the plates. I told Wasmuth flat out I would not accept it. So what has he done? Stopped the whole damn project. He won’t do another thing on the folio until I accept the photo book.” Frank’s voice was raw with hurt at the unfairness of it. “I’m too far into this now. I will have to fight him for another contract.”

There were troubles back in Chicago, too, besides the fact that he was a pariah and no one would hire him. He was about to sue Herman von Holst for cheating him out of his rightful commissions for the work he had left behind. A light snow had just fallen. She watched two people ahead of them leave dark footprints on the stone sidewalk as Frank listed the litany of struggles.

“They hate me.” He was talking of his children now.

“But you wrote that they were ecstatic to see you.”

“Oh, it didn’t take long for the truth to out. She’s turned them against me.” He swallowed hard and regained his voice. “All the bloody recriminations, the public shaming…none of it was necessary. If only she had agreed to a divorce.”

“Edwin has agreed to a divorce,” Mamah said abruptly. “Did you know that? I wrote a letter, but you probably—”

His face registered surprise. “No, I didn’t get it.”

“It’s true. He agreed to meet me in August to settle the details. I feel as if I can go back now.” She looked at him. “Maybe when Catherine learns that Edwin has agreed…”

“Don’t even think maybe,” Frank said. “It’s not going to happen.”

“You came here to tell me something, didn’t you? The thing you want to say has to do with a house. In Wisconsin.”

“Am I so transparent?”

“It’s what you’ve wanted all along.”

“My mother has agreed to buy land in her name for me. Thirty acres at Hillside, near my grandfather’s farm. Exactly the spot I told you about.” He stopped on the sidewalk. “It’s time, Mamah. It will be the most beautiful place you’ve ever lived. You won’t care if you can’t go out and see a play.”

He looked beyond her at the lines of naked trees in the park. “The main thing is, we won’t have to live these fragmented lives anymore. Who we are, what we do, what we love, everything we’ve said to each other about spreading Ellen’s ideals, teaching—it’s going to be in the mortar. It will be all one thing in that place.”

“But you haven’t had any work.”

“If Darwin Martin gives me a loan—and he will—I can begin construction this summer. Once it’s built, we can be self-sufficient. Grow our own food. Whatever it takes.” He turned and caught her nervously biting her upper lip. “Look, in Italy all you could think of was building a retreat there, away from it all. Well, this is a retreat, and every bit as beautiful as Fiesole. I’ll pay Martin back, don’t worry about that. As for the farmers around there, I won’t lie. They’re not going to be very friendly at first. They’ll want us to roast on the spit for a while. But I swear to you, we will live true. We’ll be the very model of living true.”

“Are you asking me?”

Frank had removed a glove and was crouching. With his forefinger, he made three lines in the snow. They looked to her like a child’s drawing of light rays beaming down from the sun.

“That’s the Druid symbol for ‘Truth against the world.’” He looked up at her. “It’s a tough row to hoe, to live for the true and the beautiful. Most people would laugh at me for speaking those words out loud. But it’s all I want now.” He paused. “If you will go there with me, Mame, we can do it. If you will live with me there.”

She smiled. “Are you asking me?” she repeated.

“I am.”

“Yes,” she said. “I will.”

CHAPTER
33

M
artha’s dour little face turned in the direction her mother was pointing. “Do you see him?” Mamah whispered. “He’s bright yellow.”

The girl stared into the woods.

They were both kneeling on pine needles in a small clearing. She extended the binoculars to her daughter. “Up there on that branch.”

Martha pushed away the field glasses, turning a blank stare back into the trees. “Papa is the bird teller,” she said.

Mamah stiffened, then counted the words Martha had uttered.
Five,
she thought.
That’s progress.

BACK IN BERLIN,
the idea of a summer at a Canadian camp with the children seemed the perfect scenario for the reunion. They would be her own—no Louise, no Lizzie. Edwin would bring them up and stay for a day to negotiate the terms of their divorce. Mamah had expected it to be hard for all of them, but they would be away from prying eyes. They would take their time.

For the past two years, she had inundated the children with letters and, recently, a portrait of herself. But they didn’t seem to remember her.

Two years in a child’s life is the distance between stars,
she thought. She remembered being a child herself, lolling luxuriously in a bathtub at the age of eight and contemplating the vastness of the summer ahead. And it had turned out to be that—a millennium, it seemed, of fireflies and kick the can, of nights and days strung together by one long, pulsing cricket song.

Martha had been three when Mamah left, John almost seven. In Italy and in Berlin, she had watched children of the same ages, noticed how they moved. Listened to their words. But here in the flesh, John and Martha were strangers.

John remembered her some. He was almost the same little boy who used to leap into her arms the minute he saw her. He was still Peter Pan, but taller, and with a stick now. The boy had carried some kind of stick from the moment she’d encountered him in front of the cabin. He had been pushing it into the dirt when she’d walked up. John had just stood there beaming, allowing himself to be hugged.

“Are you afraid of spiders?” were the first words out of his mouth. He went inside and returned with a mason jar housing a brown-striped thing. “Found it in the cabin,” he’d said with obvious pleasure.

Martha, on the other hand, had stood next to Edwin when Mamah arrived, connected to her father by the piece of trouser fabric she held between her thumb and forefinger. She was wearing a fat ribbon at the top of her head. Her face was entirely new. The baby fullness of her cheeks was almost gone. Martha was taking on the face she would carry from here on out, and it was a Borthwick face. High cheekbones, square jaw, a dark brushstroke of brows just like Mamah’s own. At that moment, standing in front of the cabin, the eyebrows had been clouds, black and low-hanging. Martha had slid behind Edwin when her mother approached her, and refused to come out. Edwin stood stiff and unmoving as Mamah backed off.

That night, with the children in bed, Mamah and Edwin sat in the front porch rockers, whispering.

“They will live with me,” he said.

“I want to see them.”

“You can see them at appropriate intervals.”

“How often is that?” She looked at him suspiciously.

“I don’t object to their visiting you for a couple of weeks in the summer.”

“Why not a couple of months?”

“Perhaps four weeks,” he said. “We will have to see how it works out. I don’t know what the children will be willing to do. They’re both afraid of things.”

Katydids screeched their squeaky pulley sound out in the woods.

“I never meant to cause so much suffering,” she said.

It came out as a paltry understatement. Still, her words seemed to reach Edwin, who had been exceedingly formal since she’d arrived.

“Martha didn’t understand any of it then. It was John who took the brunt of it. There were times…” Edwin stopped himself.

Mamah drew in a breath. “Go ahead.”

“In Boulder, after you left, he got lost. Mattie had taken sick by then. There were people in and out of that house—doctors, neighbors—nobody noticed that he’d gone missing. I wasn’t due until the end of that week to pick them up. When the nanny discovered that he’d disappeared, she was frantic.”

Mamah felt as if her chest had been slugged.

“He didn’t run away, it turned out. They found him that night wandering around in Boulder, miles from the house. He was looking for you.”

She pressed her lips together and put a hand across her mouth to suppress the sob that was pushing up inside. She had no right to weep.

After Edwin departed for the main lodge, she lay awake past midnight, listening to the breathing of the children across the room. John was on the top bunk, Martha on the bottom.

Four weeks, Mamah could have them. That was what Edwin had finally agreed to. Four weeks, no more, until Christmas, when she would be allowed two days of visitation in Oak Park before the holiday. After that she could have them for a few weeks in Wisconsin every summer, and could visit them when she wanted to in Oak Park.

Now they would have only a month together. How could anyone fix what had happened in one month?

“Nooooo!” Martha had howled when Edwin left in the morning. She had to be pried from his leg as he got into the waiting car. The man who ran the counter at the lodge had come out to have a look. “That’s some set of pipes,” he said.

Bird-watching. What was I thinking? What child ever really cared about bird-watching?
Mamah stood in the brittle clearing, a resinous smell wafting around them. Martha was a sullen heap at her feet.

“What’s next?” John asked.

Mamah hadn’t made an alternative plan. She looked at her watch. Ten o’clock. John walked over to the nearest pine and thwacked the trunk with his stick.

“Let’s go back to the lodge,” she said. “We might just hitch a canoe ride for you.”

SHE HADN’T PLANNED
to put them into the daylong classes the other children at the camp attended. She had hoped, selfishly, to have them to herself. She was desperate for the feel of their skin on hers—it was the one sensation she had most missed about them. In Europe she had dreamed about the feel of Martha’s fat little legs pressing on her arm as she held her. But that wasn’t going to happen. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time.

John wanted to please her, though. He didn’t initiate hugs, but he put himself in Mamah’s proximity so she could wrap her arms around him. She would pull him to her and feel his ribs and the bony little buttocks punching into her lap. At one of those moments, when he lingered, she tried to talk with him.

“I’m sorry it took me so long to get home,” she said. He leaped up before she could say another word, and ran off to join some children across the clearing.

Some days she watched them from the shore of the lake. Other parents were on their own expeditions while their children swam with the young activity leaders. Mamah felt like a spy, lurching around in the trees, trying to watch them play without their knowing she was there. John seemed comfortable with himself, she thought, chattering away as he floated in a rubber tire, then getting into water fights when he bumped into other kids. Martha, though, looked so lonesome sitting in the black rubber float, wearing the same worried look among other children that she wore around her mother.

Crouched at the edge of the water, Mamah thought of the remark some “acquaintance” had made in one of the
Tribune
articles about how she’d spent little time with her children. That remark, as much as anything, had infuriated her, because it wasn’t true. She had loved her children passionately and had spent plenty of time with them, more than a lot of mothers whose children were raised entirely by nannies. But there was a deeper truth that she had not wanted to face, and now she couldn’t avoid it.

Carrying on a love affair had been work. It had consumed her energy and preoccupied her mind all those years in Oak Park. Even in the presence of the children, her thoughts were about Frank—how they would manage to meet next, or what he had meant by a remark the last time they were together. It had been an obsession for so long that she had taken it to be normal. The children had been pushed aside, not physically, maybe, but certainly in her mind.

It hadn’t always been that way. She and John were exceptionally close before her relationship with Frank began. It wasn’t John who’d been most neglected during those years of the affair, she thought. No, it was Martha. Mamah realized she had been mentally gone since Martha was born. First with depression, then with Frank. Martha had been a year old when the affair began.

The reality of her absence hit Mamah like a flying brick. Usually, the guilt centered on the same frozen image—the moment she had walked out of the bedroom in Boulder while John and Martha slept. Always, whenever she thought of it, she asked herself the same horrified question:
Did I even look back at them?

Now she saw that she had removed herself from them long before that morning. For extended stretches in those early years, her eyes and ears and full delight—so rightfully theirs—had been focused on someone else.

Mamah sat stripping needles from a pine tassel. Somehow, she didn’t know how, she would have to make it right again. Apologies wouldn’t matter one whit to John and Martha. It would take time, maybe years, to set things right with them.

She remembered the awful days just after she’d told Edwin she loved Frank. “All your goddamn ideas ruined you, Mamah,” he’d shouted at her. “Even your children are abstract to you.”

She would never tell him she could see the kernel of truth in those words. Sitting in the woods, she said it to herself.
I wasn’t there when I should have been. Not nearly enough
.

ONE AFTERNOON NEAR
the end of July, Mamah and the children stayed on at the lodge when everyone else had gone out after lunch. Someone had taught the children to tie knots, and both had made a jumble of their projects. They were sitting under a ceiling fan watching their mother undo the twine when a dog wandered into the dining hall. The only other person around was an aproned kitchen helper who was putting dirty dishes into a sink. When he saw the animal, he moved to shoo it away.

John was on his feet and went over to greet the dog. He was medium-sized and all black, with a long snout and long ears and stringy hair hanging from his chin like a beard.

“Do you know whose dog this is?” Mamah asked the kitchen man. She felt suddenly protective of the children.

“No, ma’am,” he said, “never seen him before.”

She and Martha walked over to have a look. “Don’t get too close to him,” Mamah cautioned. But John was already on his knees, and the dog was licking him.

“He’s thirsty,” the boy said. He went over to a pile of dirty dishes and retrieved two bowls. In one he put water; in the other, leftover meat loaf from someone’s plate.

“He’s hot,” Martha said, keeping her distance.

“Well, he’s got a big heavy coat on, hasn’t he?” Mamah said. “Why don’t we go and ask if the manager knows him? He looks pretty clean. I bet someone is missing him right now.”

John pulled out a string of his knotting twine and made a leash of it. Walking over to the lodge, the dog trotted next to the boy, as if they were old friends.

“Never seen him,” the manager said. “And he doesn’t belong to any of the folks here right now, ’cause I’ve seen all their pets.”

“What about the neighbors?”

“Not that I know of. But there’s plenty of farms about. Coulda strayed from one of ’em.”

“Can we put a sign up at the lodge?”

“Sure. In fact, the driver’ll take you around, if you want to check with the neighbors.”

Martha crooked a small finger toward her mother. Mamah, taken by surprise, bent down quickly. “Can we keep him in our cabin tonight?” Martha whispered.

Mamah stood up. “We’ll be keeping him in our cabin tonight,” she said to the manager.

He shrugged. “I don’t mind if you don’t mind.”

They took the dog with them as they tacked signs to telephone poles along the road. Later, the lodge’s chauffeur took them to three neighboring farms to inquire if anyone was missing a pet. No one knew the black dog.

“Might be a huntin’ dog got loose, though it’s not the season yet,” the last farmer speculated. “Or somebody let him out on the road, maybe. People from the city do that, bring ’em out here and let ’em go.”

The children were kneeling again, petting him. The farmer lifted up the ears of the hound, opened his mouth and looked around inside, raised his tail to peer at his anus, then inspected his paws. Martha and John’s eyes followed the proceedings.

“He’s a pup,” the farmer said. “Healthy enough—no worms or sores I can see. Going to be a big fella.”

“I think there’s some wolfhound in him,” Mamah said.

“I’d take him if nobody claims him,” the man said.

On the way back to the lodge, John spoke what they were all thinking. “Papa won’t let us keep a dog.”