Free Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

Do you think you can find a boardinghouse for the children and me? If we stay the summer in Boulder, I refuse to burden you with company the whole time. Will you do that for us, dear Mattie? We’re all bursting to see you.
    Fondly,
Mamah

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,