Free The Women by T. C. Boyle Page B

the countryside seemed bleaker than it had at Christmas when even the most dismal farmhouse was enlivened by a wreath at the door or a candle in the window, at least now she had Svetlana with her to keep her company. They had their sandwiches, milk for her daughter, coffee for her, Svetlana alternately chattering to her new teddy bear (“Eat your sandwich, Teddy; Pack your things; We’re going on a trip!”) and bent in concentration over a tracing book and a box of colored pencils Frank had bought her. Everything they had in the world was packed into a single steamer trunk in the luggage car somewhere behind them (and it wasn’t much—a few changes of clothes, books, letters, two porcelain dolls Svetlana couldn’t seem to exist without—because all this time they’d been living under Georgei’s regime and Georgei preached asceticism). 20
     
    “What’s it like, Mama?” Svetlana would ask every few minutes and she would try to summon the place—it wasn’t the château at Fontainebleau, outside of Paris; it was a rambling tawny stone bungalow of the Prairie Style on the outskirts of Spring Green, Wisconsin, and it would necessarily have to be self-sufficient in terms of its culture and amusements. “You’ll like it,” she said. “You will. It is—I don’t know—like a castle, only without the turrets.”
     
    The pencils flew over the page, good high-quality tracing paper that wouldn’t tear through. Svetlana took a moment to finish what she was doing—red for the chimney of the house she was tracing, black for the smoke—and then she lifted her face. “What are turrets?”
     
    “You know, towers—like in ‘Rapunzel, let down your hair.’ ”
     
    “Like in France.”
     
    “Yes, that is right. Like in France. Only this place—Daddy Frank’s place—doesn’t have any of them.”
     
    “What does it have?”
     
    She wanted to say it had beauty, it had genius, soul, spirit, that it was the kind of house that made you feel good simply to be inside it looking out, but instead she said, “It has a lake.”
     
    “For ice-skating?”
     
    “Mm-hmm. And in summer”—she tried to picture it, the fields come to life, the barn doors flung open and the cattle grazing, fireflies in the night, constellations hanging overhead in the rafters of the universe—“we can swim. And take the boat out. And fish too.”
     
    “Are there ducks?”
     
    “Sure there are. Geese too.” She was guessing now, running ahead of herself as the train rolled through the deep freeze of the countryside, twenty below zero, thirty below, the rivers like stone, the trees in shock, not a living thing moving anywhere in all that loveless expanse. “And swans. Swans that come right up to you and take the corn out of your hand. Remember those swans in Fontainebleau—the black ones?”
     
    Svetlana stopped drawing now, two pencils—the green and brown—bristling from the knuckles of her left hand, the red one arrested over the chimney even as the roof spread wide to enclose the stick figures she’d drawn beneath it: two of them, just two, mother and daughter in matching triangular skirts. Her eyes went distant a moment and maybe she was seeing the swans, Lionel and Lisette—that’s what they’d named them, wasn’t it?—or maybe she was just tired. What she said was: “Are we almost there yet?”
     
     
    Frank and Kameki were waiting on the platform to greet them, their breath streaming, hats cocked low, collars pulled up high. They leaned into the wind, their eyes searching the windows of the train as it slowed with a seizure of the brakes, and then Kameki turned aside and cupped his hands to light a cigarette and Frank started forward, the skirts of his heavy twill cape fanning and fluttering round the tight clamp of his riding breeches and the sheen of his boots. He was right there, so close she could have reached out and touched him, but somehow he didn’t see her, and the train slid past him before it jerked