Loving Frank by Nancy Horan Read Free Book Online Page A

kind of eccentricity she had come to admire in her father. Anyone as attuned as Frank was to nature’s order, anyone raised to reason outside the mainstream, was not going to be penned in very well by society’s rules. Her father had responded to the order of the natural world, too. He was more interested in the habits of wasps than the politics of Oak Park. He hadn’t cared a fig about fashion or the neighbors’ opinions about the goats he kept in their suburban backyard. He was a “one-er,” as he called stubborn nonconformists like himself, and he had nourished the same independence in his children.
    Frank was like that. His ears and eyes and heart were tuned to seek truth in places where other people didn’t look. In this, and in so many other ways, she felt a kindred spirit to him.
             
    BELOW THE DARK MUSINGS of the winter, she wrote the date in her diary.
    August 20, 1907
             
    I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.

  1908  
    CHAPTER 6

    “ T here’s something strange going on here,” Lizzie said. It was a glorious October morning, a Saturday, and she was standing at the stove while the edge of an egg curled to a brown ruffle in bacon grease.
    Mamah glanced up from the newspaper. “What do you mean?” She felt cords in her stomach knotting up.
    “It’s on page three, I think. There are men going door-to-door selling fake creamery butter. Right here in Oak Park. Did you see that?”
    Mamah’s shoulders relaxed. “No.”
    “We need to tell Louise when she comes on Monday so she doesn’t open the door.”
    “What are you doing today?”
    “Taking Jessica to a movie,” Lizzie said, flipping the egg.
    “You’re a peach, Liz.” They had all taken on the girl after Jessie’s death, but it was Lizzie who truly mothered her.
    “Do you want to come?”
    “No. I’m headed down to the university this afternoon.”
    Mamah didn’t even blink now when she lied. Deception came easily; it was almost routine. Frank would be waiting for her at his office, perhaps with flowers he had bought, or tea and sandwiches brought in from a restaurant.
    “Robert Herrick is giving a special program on the New Woman,” she said to Lizzie. “Edwin’s taking the kids to the zoo.”
             
    “CATHERINE KNOWS,” Frank said. They were lying on the carpet. Mamah could hear a violinist playing scales somewhere.
    She sat up and looked at him. His eyes were closed. “That’s why you’re quiet.”
    “She won’t say how she found out.”
    “What did you tell her?”
    “I told her the truth. I asked for a divorce.”
    Mamah took his hand in hers and squeezed it.
This was bound to come.
She reached for her camisole on the floor nearby.
    “Don’t get up yet,” he said. “Stay with me here.”
    The room was bright and cool. She pulled a folded mover’s quilt off the top of a crate close by, covering the length of her body with it. Goose bumps coursed up and down her arms and legs.
    “Catherine will keep it quiet,” he said grimly. “She’s too proud to tell anyone.”
    Mamah imagined Catherine sobbing. Catherine hurling
The House Beautiful
at her husband’s head. Catherine climbing a ladder with a hammer and smashing the lovely figures in the living room frieze. It chilled her to think of what Catherine might want to do to her—a woman she had considered a friend.
    Mamah cringed at the thought of the betrayal.
But I didn’t steal Frank,
she reasoned. His marriage had been bad for so long, it was possible he’d been intimate with other women before her. She had never pressed him on it because she hadn’t wanted to know. Yet that possibility conferred a strange solace just now.
    “I’ll tell Edwin,” she said.
    In the past couple of months, she and Frank had talked of simply coming out with it, asking for divorces. It was what both of them wanted, to live honestly. People got