“I’m sorry,” she said, though she didn’t know why or what she had to apologize for, “—to, to interrupt you like this. You’re doing a very fine job there. But I just wanted to say — about that first interview — well, I’d like you to have this.” She held out the book to him, and without coming up out of his crouch, he shifted the brush to his left hand and took it from her with his right, his gestures so slow and deliberate he might have been moving underwater. He didn’t even glance at the book. Just held her eyes, as if to await further instructions. Or any instructions.
“I think you’ll find this rewarding,” she went on. “Enlightening too, I hope. You see, no matter what our various cultures proclaim, marriage is almost everywhere the same. And, by and large, the women are the ones to suffer — under the current system, the system under which we’ve had to live from time immemorial, from the time of Moses and beyond, the Egyptians, I suppose, the Mesopotamians — women have been unequal partners and must live out their lives unfulfilled, in either love or work. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Nothing. He knelt there in his fumes.
“I’m speaking of Gertrude. Of your wife.”
Suddenly his face opened up. “Oh, don’t you worry about her,” he said, and he was grinning now. “I’ve got that under control.”
“No, I don’t think you understand — she needs to express herself.” The grin faded. He was shaking his head side to side. “I know that, ma’am, and that’s why I work her day and night to stop her talking like a bush nigger and use the King’s English. And she will. She will.” His eyes stared out past her, as if he were addressing someone across the room. His voice went cold. “I promise you that.”
When Frank came home for two days at the weekend, he was every bit as pleased as she was with the new help. Billy Weston fetched him from the station an hour before dinner, and he blew into the house like a cool breeze, taking her in his arms and dancing round the room with her before thrusting a foil-wrapped box of chocolates at her and disappearing into the drafting room to confer with Emil and Herbert. Of course, he couldn’t help shifting a vase from one shelf to another along the way or sliding a chair six inches to the right before deciding to move it back again — it was a compulsion with him — but the house seemed to have passed muster. The next she saw him was when she went out to her garden to cut flowers for the table and he was striding across the courtyard with Billy Weston in tow, firing off instructions to Lindblom, the landscaper, and his foreman, Thomas Brunker (a big-bellied man with a corona of white hair who always gave her a sour look, as if he disapproved of her, and so much the worse for him because she was the mistress of this house now and she was here to stay). “Dinner in ten minutes, Frank,” she sang out, and he smiled and waved and went on round the corner, never breaking stride.
When they finally did sit down to dinner she saw that he seemed to have lost weight — fretting over the loose ends at Midway, sleeping irregularly and to all appearances dining on the fly or not at all — but he tucked into everything Carleton brought out of the kitchen on the silver tray he held high over one shoulder and manipulated with a flourish that managed to be neither subservient nor showy, but just precisely right. Gertrude surpassed herself with the cuisine, serving up one of her spicy stews (“ ‘Hotter de day, hotter de spice,’ dat what my mama say. ‘You got to sweat to cool off ’ ”), with cornbread, cucumber salad and mint yogurt made from a culture she’d brought with her from Barbados via Chicago, fresh-picked melon and a berry tart. The next day she spent the whole morning preparing a picnic lunch, which Carleton, ever proper in his white jacket, served them on blankets down by the lake. Frank was enraptured, declaring the day a holiday from work and inviting all his employees, right on down to the field hands, to join in the festivities. The plates circulated. Carleton went up and down the hill a dozen times and every time he came back the platter was laden and everybody agreed that they’d never tasted better fried chicken or potato salad or pork chops and greens. They were lying there on their blankets, content, when one of the men pulled out a mouth organ and Frank started the singing and before anyone knew it the stars were showing overhead.
The next day Frank went back to Chicago, but not before putting away a two-fisted farmer’s breakfast and raising such a hosanna of praise to Gertrude’s buttermilk pancakes that she sidled out of the kitchen to give him a shy smile and one of her Barbadian homilies (“Nothin’ better den you eat well and purge clean”), and when he came back in the middle of the following week, she slaughtered a turkey for him and stuffed it with a mixture of smoked sausage and something she called cou-cou. And then Frank was gone again and the work of the farm went on and Mamah found herself counting down the days till the first of August, when John and Martha were due for their visit.
She was there at the station an hour early on the appointed day. Billy Weston parked the automobile at the curb and made use of the time to bring out the sheen of its finish with a nappy cloth and a can of wax, always thinking of Frank and how particular he was about the condition of his machines, while she paced up and down the platform in the rising still heat of mid-morning. She hadn’t seen the children since Christmas when she and Frank had gone into Chicago to a hotel and she tried to make up for the past two Christmases by taking them out to a restaurant and the symphony and burying them in gifts they seemed entirely indifferent to. Ellen Key had liberated her and she knew she should feel nothing but joy in her present circumstances — she was one of the chosen ones, a woman living her life in love’s freedom171—and yet still, the looks on their faces, wary and hopeful at the same time, always seemed to flood her with guilt. Each time she saw them she expected them to deny her, to lash out and declare their independence — or worse, to tell her about Edwin’s new bride and how she was their mother now. Because their old mother wasn’t fit. Had never been fit and never would be.
The train pulled into the station, one more arrival, and there they were, looking like strangers, John too adult now at twelve to take her hand and Martha gazing up at her in bewilderment, as if she were having difficulty placing her. “Children,” she cried, “John, Martha, come to your mother,” and they did come, with some prompting by their nanny (Edwin’s employee and no love lost there), because they had no choice. “How was your trip?” she asked as they waved their goodbyes to the nanny and settled themselves in the automobile, and both immediately answered “Fine,” in unison, as if they’d rehearsed it. “Well, good,” she said. “We’ve got all sorts of things planned for you — horseback riding, swimming, of course, and, John, did I tell you there’s a new rowboat for the lake? And, Martha — we’ve got peacocks now, two of them, and they have the most wonderful call or squawk or whatever it is. .”
It was hot. The children were withdrawn. She found herself nattering on inanely, hoping to spark some sort of reaction in them, but they seemed joyless, as if coming to the country were a rare form of punishment. John perked up a bit over the details of Frank’s motorcar, comparing it (unfavorably) to the new red Abadal Stephen Pennybacker’s father had just bought, and Martha seemed gratified to discover the dolls she’d left behind last summer lined up all in a row on the shelf beside the bed, and yet it wasn’t until after they’d gone down to the lake for a swim that they began to resemble the children Mamah remembered. There was something in that scene — bare legs and feet, the skipping of stones and chasing after the geese, frogs erupting in their chorus, the smell of hair gone wet and dry and wet again — that had a deeply calming effect. By suppertime, both children were complacent, replete with their hamburger sandwiches, Coca-Cola and paper-thin Barbadian potato crisps. By bedtime, she was able to look in on them and offer a goodnight kiss, and Martha, though she announced that she was almost nine now and perfectly capable of reading on her own, allowed her to sit in the rocker by the bed and read aloud from The Wind in the Willows as if the past five years had been merely an interruption.