Loving Frank (7 page)

CHAPTER
9

E
dwin stood in a stripe of dusty light on the train platform. Like all the other men, he was dressed in a cool summer suit, but it appeared to Mamah as if he might combust. His scarlet face dripped sweat. His fists clenched and unclenched. He stared past her, down the boarding platform, where porters lifted bags and children up the silver steps of the Rocky Mountain Limited. John leaned against a post a few feet away, eyeing his parents.

“I’m sorry, Ed,” Mamah whispered. She held Martha, whose damp head rested on her shoulder. “A few months apart will bring some clarity.”

“Why are you doing this to us?” Edwin growled.

Mamah turned her back, but he continued in an angry whisper, talking at the back of her head. “Do you think you’re the first woman to fall for that jackass?
For Christ’s sake,
come to your senses.”

“Please, Ed. I need some time.”

“If he shows up out there, so help me God—”

A train whistle blasted. The last passengers were boarding. She pushed Martha into his arms for a hug, watched Edwin’s body soften as he kissed her head. He called John and bent down to him.

By the time they reached their seats, the train was moving. The children leaned out the window, waving. With one hand clutching his hat and his other raised in mute farewell, Edwin grew small, then disappeared as they pulled away.

Martha squirmed all over the compartment as the train clattered out of the city, past the stockyards where aproned men dragged on cigarettes outside long buildings. Mamah pointed to a dog lying in the shade of a grocery store awning, a barber pole spinning in the breeze, anything to engage her daughter as the train moved past the outlying suburbs where telephone poles ended and sagging barns buttressed with ricks of straw began, past wooded ravines and hay fields, through the small farm settlements where women stood next to clotheslines of billowing shirts, shading their eyes. When Martha’s agitation waned, Mamah sank back in her seat, exhausted.

A half hour out of town, Edwin’s stricken wave already haunted her. In the past week, she had punctured her good husband’s soul, and the cruelty of it wouldn’t go away. She replayed again and again in her mind the moment she had told him. He had nearly fallen over from the blow, the way a soldier might take a cannonball to the belly. He had sunk down on their bed, staring at her in disbelief.

When he began to talk in the following hours, he grilled her, trying to piece it all together. How could such a thing have happened? It didn’t make sense to him.

Neither Mamah nor Edwin had slept that night. They’d talked—argued—until midnight, when he stormed over to the liquor shelf, grabbed a bottle, and went out the side door. When she walked into the bedroom around three to get a blanket to sleep on the sofa, she saw the light of his cigar outside, flickering in the dark.

The next morning, they had sat across from each other in the backyard so as to talk in privacy. The children were still at home, though Louise had sniffed a sea change in the house the moment she’d arrived, and was set to take them to the park soon.

Mamah was doing better than he that morning. She’d managed a bath, a fresh shirtwaist, earrings. He was seated in the same garden chair he’d occupied all night, his bearlike shoulders rounded and bent forward, his elbows on his knees. One of his shoes was untied. Stubbed-out Preferidas lay around his chair, ground into leafy pulp.

From time to time he dabbed a handkerchief at his eyes. She had never seen Edwin cry, not once in ten years of marriage, and now he was sobbing intermittently.

“You were in love with me then, I’m sure of it,” he said.

Behind him, in the open window of their room, she could see the housekeeper pulling sheets off the bed. Mamah pressed her lips together.

“In college,” he said, “I knew I was the clumsy kid, and you were the…You were just so beautiful. I’d see you standing on the steps, talking with some other smart girl…” He shook his head. “All those years later, when I tracked you down in Port Huron? I really believed it was a new day. I believed I was rescuing you from that backwater town. I wanted to bring you to the city and give you everything you deserved.”

Edwin trained his eyes on hers. “Do you remember when we were first married? I’d had a couple of back teeth pulled by the dentist, and I came home and lay down on the couch afterward. I put my head on your lap, and you read to me—an entire book. It was one of the happiest times of my life.”

Mamah remained silent. If they were now who they had once been, she might have joked, “You were on morphine.” Instead, she breathed evenly, bore it. She owed him this and more.

“I can never remember the name of the book,” he went on, “but I remember the story was about a couple who lived on an island, alone. They grew all their own food and built their own house. You said you wanted to do that with me someday.” His eyes grew watery again. “I gave you the wrong things, didn’t I?” He waved his hand toward the house.

Mamah glanced at her hands in her lap, folded like a penitent’s. She unlaced her fingers. “It just happened, Ed. It’s not your fault.”

From Martha’s bedroom window, a shrill giggle echoed against the walls.

Edwin’s head was down, across from her knees, as he tied his shoe. The few strands of hair that he always combed back across his tender pate looked absurd now, like strings on a banjo. For a fleeting moment she wanted to put his head in her lap, stroke it. But when he lifted his eyes, he wore a baleful expression.

“You can take them to Colorado with you,” he said. “But don’t think for a minute you could ever get custody of them.”

ROWS OF ILLINOIS CORN
fanned out from the horizon like green spokes in a wheel that kept turning. Across acres of farmland west of Chicago, the black earth divided itself from the sky in one flat pencil line.

“On to the Rockies,” she said softly.

John held Martha steady as she stood with her nose pressed to the window. He was behaving even more kindly to his sister than usual. Mamah was certain he was aware of the crisis in the house during the past week. At seven, John was the most empathetic, finely tuned creature she had ever known. Even as a baby, he’d been a watcher. Cautious, reserved. When he was six months old, he had sat on her lap, an exclamation of brown curls at the top of his otherwise bald head, and watched. She recalled the time she’d broken her ankle in a fall from a bicycle. John was four at the time. He had come to her room to find her in bed with her foot bandaged and elevated by a pulley. He had stood at the door with a pained look on his face and said simply, “It hurts me.”

She reached out and rubbed John’s back. “Grandpa was a train man, you know.”

“You always say that,” he said. “But what did he do?”

“Well, he wasn’t always a train man. First he was an architect, and then a carriage builder.” Mamah rallied, injecting cheeriness into her voice. “But when the Chicago and North Western train came through Boone, he took a job with the railroad. He could fix anything, and he got very good at repairing trains. Pretty soon they put him in charge of all the men who repaired North Western trains.”

“Is that why you moved away from Iowa?”

“I think so. Papa started working for the railroad around the time I was born. And I was six when we left. Maybe he was in charge of things by then.”

“What was Boone like?”

“We lived in an old house in the country. That’s where I was born. I remember we had chickens, and I would have to go out and catch one for dinner. I used a long piece of wire that I bent at the end and hooked around the chicken’s legs. It was a farm, and we could run free. We caught and skinned copperhead snakes—with my father’s help, of course. We weren’t afraid of wild things, you see, because we were wild ourselves. My father had a rule: Anything we found, we could raise. One night a mouse had babies—little pink things—and the mother ran off. So we fed them with an eyedropper and tried to keep them, but they ran off, too. My sister was fond of these big, horned tomato caterpillars—oh, they were ugly. But they were her babies. We had a skunk for a while and named her Petunia, but she didn’t make a very good pet.

“There seemed to be a big event happening every half hour on that farm. Someone would call ‘Come see!’ and everyone would run over. Maybe a turtle was laying eggs, or a snake was shedding its skin, or someone had captured the biggest tadpole.”

“What else?”

“Well, a day or two before we left Boone, I put a note under a loose floorboard in my bedroom. It said, ‘My name is Mamah. I hope you are a girl.’ I signed my full name and my age.”

“Do you think she found it?”

“Oh, I don’t even know if there was a ‘she.’ But I surely hoped so. I wanted someone to know I had lived there. I was hoping a girl would look out the window at the path through the prairie grass and think,
Maybe Mamah went down that path.
And then perhaps she would follow it and find what I left there.”

“What did you leave there?”

“It’s a secret.”

“No,” he groaned.

Mamah laughed. “But I’ll tell you. I dragged a piece of old braided rug and a chair out in the field. We left in August, and the prairie was high—over my head. You wouldn’t have seen that rug and chair unless you went exploring. But if you did find it, and you sat down, you would discover a private little room there. When the grass got high, it made walls all around.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know. Why are children always making hiding places? You tell me.”

John pondered it. “Because we like to have secret places that maybe only your best friend knows about.”

“Of course,” she said. “I had almost forgotten that.”

MAMAH COULDN’T RIDE
a train without thinking of her father. He had spent forty years keeping the North Western’s rolling stock welded together, and moving its thousands of wheel pairs in unison over a vast web of tracks every day, all year round. When he died so suddenly, it took everyone by surprise. The whole company came to his funeral, from the president to the repairmen he oversaw to a half-dozen Pullman porters.

From her earliest years, she had understood that her father was solid and reliable. He had prized those qualities and recognized them in Edwin when he came into the household. Ed and her father had been not just family but good friends. What would Marcus Borthwick think of all this trouble if he were alive?

An image flashed in her mind just then of Lizzie and a bereft Edwin bumping around the empty house on East Avenue.
Will they eat together still?

When she felt tears coming, she pushed her mind back to where it had been, to the place where she was twelve again, sprung from school and sitting next to a train window, the smell of wheat in her nostrils. A train whistle could make her pulse quicken in those days. It meant strangers with stories, and steak sizzling on heavy white china in the dining car. Now it was enough that the whistle could distract her from the mess she had left behind in Oak Park.

She thought of the Rock Island Line advertisement that had leaped out at her the morning after Mattie’s letter had arrived. In the illustration, a young woman reposed thoughtfully, chin in hand, gazing out a train window at mountains and fat white clouds.

Vacation upon the tableland of the continent,
the ad had read.
You will earn its cost out of the extra ideas you will gain and the extra vigor you’ll feel for the rest of the year.

Outside, Mamah glimpsed a stand of birches glowing yellow, electrified by the late-afternoon sun.
If anyone ever needed an extra idea,
she thought,
it is I.

MARTHA WAS RESTLESS STILL,
but refused to nap. John produced string from his pocket and indulged her with cat’s cradle. When she tired of it, she invented her own amusement. She began by pushing at John until he stood up. He rolled his eyes.

Now Martha was pushing Mamah’s legs. “Move, Mama,” she insisted. “You move.”

“No, I won’t move, Martha,” Mamah said. “These seats are for all of us.”

“You move!” Martha was shrieking now.

Mamah sat stoically as the three-year-old hurled herself at her mother’s legs, then rolled around the floor of the compartment in her yellow dress, wailing.

“John,” Mamah whispered close to her son’s ear. “Just let her be. She’ll tire out, and then it will be over.”

John smiled, pleased to be the good child.

Martha continued to wail until her small body shook with dry sobs.

“Would you like to come up, Martha?” Mamah asked.

She crawled up onto the seat and put her head in her mother’s lap. Mamah closed her burning eyes.

WHEN MARTHA WOKE,
Mamah walked the children up to the locomotive, where the engineer pulled the whistle for their benefit. At dinner Martha complained of a stomachache and began crying again. Mamah retreated with her to their car, while John continued playing tic-tac-toe at the dinner table with a boy his size.