Loving Frank Read Online Free PDF Page A

so easy with you. The truth is, I live a pretty stultifying existence at home. I love my children, but…” He shrugged. “My life is not in them the way Catherine’s is. Her whole being is invested in them. I’ve done the same thing with my work, I know—taken refuge in it. But she and I have reached an impasse. And we are too far gone to fix it.”
    Mamah thought,
Take me home.
They had left the safe territory of architecture. “People change over time,” she said. “I think it happens in a lot of marriages.”
    Frank waited.
    “That’s not what happened in my case, though,” she said. “I was mature enough—too mature. My head trumped my heart.” She looked at the ground, ashamed to betray Edwin in this way. “Ed is a good, decent man,” she said. “We’re just mismatched.” She did not confide what she’d been feeling these days. That lately, when her husband came into the same room, she felt as if the air had been sucked right out of it.
    By the third day, there was no use pretending. There were furtive caresses, followed by long silences.
    On the fourth morning, Mamah awoke nauseated and knew almost immediately. She called Frank’s office and left a message with his secretary: Mrs. Cheney is unable to meet today.
    When he appeared unannounced the following Tuesday, she kept the screen door closed when she told him she would not see him again. Standing on the stoop, he looked stricken.
    She put her palm on the wire mesh between them. “Frank,” she said, tipping her head back so the tears wouldn’t breach. “I just found out.” She forced cheer into her voice. “Ed and I are expecting a baby.”
             
    MAMAH SNAPPED FROM her reverie, climbed out of the tub, and returned to the bedroom, where she stared blankly into the closet.
    I miss our talks.
Had he said that to other women? In the two years since the day she’d told him she was pregnant, she’d seen Frank driving his Stoddard-Dayton around town with one woman after another next to him. People called his car the “Yellow Devil” not only for its color and speed but also, she suspected, for his devil-may-care attitude about gossip. It was humiliating to think that he might regard her as he did those other clients or prospective clients or whoever they were.
    When Mamah glanced at the clock, she realized she had only half an hour before Frank was scheduled to appear. She put on a white waist and black skirt, dug into her jewel box for the thin gold chain with one fat pearl. Brushing her hair into a twist at the back of her head, she leaned in close to the mirror to examine her face. She knew she’d done too much of that lately, looking for more evidence, as if she needed it, that she was nearly thirty-nine years old.
    As a thin child, she had thought her features were freakish—a pole neck, a square jaw out of proportion to the rest of her, wide high cheekbones that earned her the nickname “bone face” in the schoolyard. Her horn spectacles had hidden the green eyes her father said were pretty. Only the arching brows might have been acceptable had they not behaved so infuriatingly. They gave away everything. “You’re angry,” her mother would say, studying the roiling black line across her forehead.
    Around the age of eighteen, she had grown into her face. Her clumsy limbs became supple, and she found herself moving through the world with a new ease. The boys who had taunted her suddenly came calling.
    With her hair swept up now, the long neck looked pretty with the pearl resting in the shell-like dip between her collarbones. She touched cologne on her wrist, took off her glasses, and closed the bedroom door.

CHAPTER 4

    “ W here is everyone?” Frank asked when he stepped into the foyer. He handed her the rolled-up drawings he carried under his arm and removed his long silk scarf.
    “Lizzie and Louise took the children down to Marshall Field’s.” She felt awkward as she waited to take his coat, standing so