Delusional. Yes, she was delusional. She didn’t see anything in his face that morning but a kind of numbness, and when he didn’t call, didn’t telegram, even from New York or the steamer that would take him across the Atlantic to Germany, she still couldn’t seem to get a grasp on the situation, not till the reporters began to knock at the door and the grocer and the tailor and the liveryman crowded in behind.
CHAPTER 2: AUF WIEDERSEHEN, MEINE KINDER
At first, Mamah couldn’t seem to lift her head from the pillow. She felt as if she were paralyzed from the neck down, strapped to the mattress like one of those ragged howling women in the madhouse, buried under an avalanche, a rockslide, the deepest waters of the deepest sea. If the house had suddenly gone up in flames she couldn’t have moved, not to save her own life or Martha’s or John’s either. It must have been late in the afternoon now, judging from the light, and she’d been lying here through the stations of the sun since it rose up blazing out of the dun slab of the mountains and all the yellow-leafed poplars or aspens or whatever they were started to jump and twist in the breeze. She’d slept and dreamed and woken, the cycle repeating over and again, but nothing had changed. Julia143 was dead and the baby dead too, and she hadn’t been spared the bloody sheets and the hopeless frantic pacing of the hour before dawn or the look in the eyes of the doctor with his masked face and invisible mouth.
She could hear the house settling in around her as the sun poised a moment on the fulcrum of the tallest mountain and then flickered out, the dry cold of elevation settling into the walls, the roof, the resisting panels of the windows. Soon it would be dark and then she’d have the night to lie through and another day after that. And what about the children? They would have been home from school by now — Julia’s Teddy and Joe and her own son — but the maids would have seen to them, Julia’s boys especially. And the husband. It came to her then that she was alone in the house with the husband, a man she’d never liked, a man like Edwin, closemouthed and inexpressive, as if to think and feel and reconnoiter the soul were a violation of some manly vow, as if to be insensate were the key to life. Well, she wasn’t insensate. She was alive. And she’d come here to get away from a man with no more feeling than a stone and to be with Julia, her dearest friend, a graceful high-spirited woman in the prime of life whose last pregnancy had been such a trial and who needed someone to be with, to laugh with, to feel with, and was it a surprise that in these last months she’d felt at home, truly at home, for the first time in years?
And now Julia was dead and she was a stranger in another man’s house.
The thought spurred her and she sat up abruptly. The moment of crisis had come. She had to move, act, see to the children. And her bags — she must get her bags packed, because she wouldn’t stay here, not another moment. And Frank. She had to telegram to Frank. At the thought of it, of what she would say to him — how she could even begin to tell him what she felt, the shock of the words on the nurse’s lips, Julia’s blood that couldn’t be stanched, a whole wide coursing river of it infusing every towel and sheet and garment till they were stained like the relics of the saints, the stillborn child as twisted and gray as a lump of wax propped against his dead mother’s shoulder, the night she’d spent, the fear and hurt and anger — she could feel the grief rising in her till everything shaded to gray and the mountains beyond the window fell away into the void. But she wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t. There was no time for that.
The first thing was to change out of her clothes — she was still in the dress she’d worn yesterday — and put something on her stomach. But then she didn’t want to ring for one of the maids. The thought of that froze her. If she rang, they’d remember she was here still, they’d come to the door and enter the room and stare at her and speak and nod and put impossible questions to her — did she want soup, a sandwich, butter with her bread, jam? — and she couldn’t allow that. And she certainly didn’t want to go down to the dining room or the kitchen where she’d be exposed to him or the servants or the relatives who must have gathered by now or anyone else — and she realized, in that moment, that she didn’t want to see the children either. The thought of them, John and Martha, with their multiplicity of needs, their wants and fears and the onus that was on her to meliorate whatever they’d been able to glean from the maids when they learned that Teddy and Joe were strictly enjoined from playing and that their own mother was indisposed and not under any circumstances to be disturbed, made her feel paralyzed all over again. She had a vivid fantasy of slipping out the window, shimmying down the nearest tree and stealing away across the grounds that led to the street into town and the sidewalk that led to the train that led. . to where?
To Frank. That was where the train led. To Frank.
She unfastened the buttons of her dress, pulled it up over her head and dropped it to the floor beside her, then went into the bathroom to run the water in the tub. The tiles were cold under her bare feet. She could smell herself, the dried sweat under her arms and between her legs, the odor of fear and uncertainty. When she reached for the faucet her hand trembled and she saw that and noted it and tried to look at it dispassionately as if this were someone else’s hand, but she couldn’t. Why was her hand trembling? she had to ask herself. Because of Julia? Because life had failed her and the shock of that was so insupportable she could scarcely stand to go on living herself? Because she couldn’t stay here and couldn’t go back to Edwin? Or was it something else, something she couldn’t name, the dark climactic moment of her life clawing for release? She twisted off the faucet and stood up. What was she thinking? She had no time for a bath. A bath was insane, ludicrous. The indulgence of a woman who couldn’t make up her mind.
She stepped out of her undergarments and sponged herself quickly, not daring to look into the mirror for fear of seeing someone else there, someone who would comfort the children and wait out the funeral, linger over her feelings as if they were beads on a rosary, subsume herself in someone else. Order flowers. Hide behind a black veil. That sort of person. As she dressed and began folding her clothes and arranging them in the suitcase, she was composing the telegram to Edwin in her mind — and the letter that would follow. Julia’s dead, Edwin. Or no: There has been a terrible tragedy. Julia died in childbirth. I cannot remain here in this house one minute longer. It is too painful. Come for the children on the next train. Your wife.
When the suitcase was packed, she put on her hat and coat and went to the door to peer out into the hallway. Julia’s husband had made his fortune in silver — he had his own mining company somewhere off in those labyrinthine mountains144—and the house was a testament to his parvenu yearnings, a great rambling cloyingly decorated Queen Anne with twenty bedrooms and a congeries of shadowy hallways. It was the antithesis of what Frank had achieved in her own house, and she’d always loathed it. Until now. Now it was just the thing, dim lights in sconces creeping along the walls, staircases to nowhere, a subterranean feel to the hallways as if the architect were trying to replicate the tunnels of the mines themselves. There was no one in the hall. All was quiet.