The Women (27 page)
The commissions evaporated. The leaves blazed and fell. No one was building anything. And here came the holidays again and the cold and the compulsion to live with less, to do without, to pinch and scrape and hoard even as Frank, mercurial as always, denied himself nothing and the debts mounted. The draftsmen drifted away, all but for Herbert, who stayed on—as did Billy Weston and a handful of the workmen—for the promise of sustenance alone. Christmas was narrow, New Year’s narrower yet.
There came a day just after the New Year when Olgivanna was helping the housemaid with the wash, stringing wet clothing on a line in one of the back rooms (the girls’ things, always filthy, half a dozen of Frank’s shirts, his underwear and socks), feeling vaguely irritated because the housemaid claimed she had a touch of the flu and wasn’t feeling well if you please, ma’am, and there was so much to be done. The previous day’s thaw that took the temperatures up into the thirties had been nothing more than a tease—a high-pressure system had settled in overnight and when she woke that morning the thermometer in the courtyard had registered ten below zero. Which was part of the problem she was now having—the clothes had stiffened on the line because the fireplace wasn’t drawing properly and no matter how much wood she stacked up she got nothing but the palest feeble lick of flame. And Mrs. Dunleavy (rehired because there was no one else) was all but useless, shifting about as if her feet had been nailed to the floor, her eyes rheumy and her face the color and consistency of the ball of dough Olgivanna had set aside to rise in the kitchen.
Exasperated, her fingers stiff and the breath hanging like a shroud at the tip of her nose—she might as well have been outside for all the good the fire did her—she dropped the garment in her hands, crossed the room and bent impatiently to the fireplace. She poked at the fire a moment without effect, then snatched up the tongs and began extracting the logs, one by one, laying them on the stone apron though they were half-burnt and smoking still. “It could be the flue, ma’am,” Mrs. Dunleavy opined, even as the room filled with smoke. Olgivanna squinted up the chimney. The flue was open, as far as she could determine, but she beat at it with the poker in any case, leaning deep into the aperture and running the iron rod as far up the chimney as she could, hoping to dislodge some of the soot and resin there. She tried to keep her eyes closed, working the poker by touch, running it round and round, beating at the stone till she could feel the blackened particles sifting down into her hair and settling on the back of her neck. Then the larger chunks began to fall, and more yet, soot everywhere and the room choked with smoke.
When she was satisfied, she sent Mrs. Dunleavy to the pantry for newspaper and then she meticulously restacked the logs atop a crosshatch of kindling, and this time, when she held a match to it, the fire took. Almost immediately the smoke began to clear and both women edged closer to the fire to warm themselves. “You’re all dirt, ma’am,” Mrs. Dunleavy said, but Olgivanna didn’t hear her. She stood there, feeding the flames and warming her hands, her hair come loose from the frugal bun into which she’d twisted it that morning, her face smudged and hands blackened. They would be eating chicken for dinner that night, roasted, and chicken in a ragout for the next week, because something had got into the hen-house, a sleek killer of the night that killed for the pleasure of it, for the love of chaos, and left the corpses behind. The pipes had frozen in the main bathroom. The generator had given out and she’d sent Billy Weston to see about it, and so they’d be dining by candlelight. And what else? A tree was down across the back road and she didn’t know what they would do for eggs in the morning. But it was nothing, nothing to her, and she took it all in stride. She was in charge now, just as she’d been at Fontainebleau with Georgei, but there she was just one of Georgei’s disciples, one of his women. Here she was a wife.
Frank needn’t bother with any of it, and that was her pride. Increasingly, in any case, he was away from home, lecturing to make ends meet. He’d been in Chicago all week, delivering a lecture at the Art Institute and doing his best to attract commissions along the way, and he was due home any minute now—she could picture the car winding up the hill and pulling into the driveway, the wheels glittering in the weak winter light, the headlamps radiant—and she told herself she should clean up, put on a fresh dress, comb out her hair, but there was the laundry still and then the bread and dinner after that and a thousand other things. As it turned out, she was so busy she never even heard the car. She was in the kitchen, seeing to the bread while Mrs. Taggertz basted the chicken and the girls played in the bedroom. Everything was still, dusk coming down, the only sounds the rhythmic swish of Mrs. Taggertz’s basting brush and the steady purr of the fire in the stove.
Then Frank was there, striding into the kitchen in his hat, coat and scarf, bringing the scent of the outdoors with him and all the fierce joy of his uncontainable energy—Frank, Frank Lloyd Wright, the genius of her life—and he stooped to brush her cheek with a kiss though there was a smudge of soot on the flange of her nose and another on her chin like the beginnings of a beard, and he was talking, already talking, bursting with the immeasurable tale of his drive up and the people at the lecture in Chicago and how he was certain, one hundred percent certain, that he had a commission for a new building there and that he’d heard from Darwin Martin and his cousin Richard and both of them were committed to the designs he’d presented them and the money would be there soon, soon, soon. His arms were laden with packages. A gift for her, gifts for the girls and for himself, a statue he couldn’t resist, for the Blue Loggia. “And this,” he said, handing it to her quickly because the girls had heard the car and here they were hurtling into the room to leap round him and sing out his name, and what was it, a newspaper? “There’s something here for you,” he said, and in the next moment he was gone, the girls spinning in his wake.
She took her time, setting the gift-wrapped box and the newspaper aside till she was finished with the task at hand—the bread had to be timed to Mrs. Taggertz’s schedule and she had to get Herbert in to set the table for eleven, or no, twelve tonight. The windows darkened. Steam rose from the pot of potatoes on the stove. She could smell the chicken browning as she shaped and braided the loaves and set the pan in the oven. Then she sat at the kitchen table to unwrap the gift he’d given her—it was a piece of jewelry, very simple, a single opal teardrop on a gold chain. She reached up to fasten it around her neck and felt the grit there from the chimney, thinking she’d have to draw a bath after dinner, and that would involve stoking the steam boiler in the cellar and yet more wood for fuel. Finally, she took up the newspaper, expecting another article about Frank, a review of one of his lectures or the announcement of an honor bestowed on him. He’d folded back the page and marked it with an asterisk. She moved the candle closer.
It wasn’t what she’d thought. What she was reading—and she had to catch her breath with the sudden shock of it—was an obituary. Maude Miriam Noel had passed away in Milwaukee two days earlier after slipping into a coma following an intestinal operation. She was sixty-one.
Fifteen years ago,
the article read,
when she first figured on the front pages of American newspapers, she was a striking beauty with russet hair and hazel eyes—a talented sculptress cherishing honors won in the art circles of Paris.
And now? Now she was dead. Her estate, consisting of her personal effects and a $7,000 judgment against her ex-husband, Frank Lloyd Wright, was bequeathed to a friend of her youth, Mrs. Leora Caruthers of Santa Monica, California. Miriam’s three children, with whom she’d fallen out, were left one dollar each. Services were to be held in Milwaukee.
Fifteen years ago,
the article read,
when she first figured on the front pages of American newspapers, she was a striking beauty with russet hair and hazel eyes—a talented sculptress cherishing honors won in the art circles of Paris.
And now? Now she was dead. Her estate, consisting of her personal effects and a $7,000 judgment against her ex-husband, Frank Lloyd Wright, was bequeathed to a friend of her youth, Mrs. Leora Caruthers of Santa Monica, California. Miriam’s three children, with whom she’d fallen out, were left one dollar each. Services were to be held in Milwaukee.
For a long moment, Olgivanna stared down at the newspaper before her, smoothing it over and over again while the candle guttered and Mrs. Taggertz moved vaguely on the periphery, shifting things atop the stove. She told herself she felt nothing. Or almost nothing. Relief, she supposed, but not triumph and certainly not regret or even sympathy. A strangeness, just that, as if the world had gone away a moment and then come rushing back in all its immediacy. She was just about to rise from the chair and see to the bread—she could smell it suddenly, the hot layered scent of it expanding through the room till it overwhelmed everything, even the chicken—when all at once the lights flickered and came on again. Without thinking, she leaned forward and blew out the candle, then got up to take the loaves out of the oven.
PART II
MIRIAM
INTRODUCTION TO PART II
I
n the second year of the Fellowship, tuition rose from $675 to $1,100—a sixty-three percent increase—and I wrote my father for additional funds and my father indulged me. By this time, I was so thoroughly committed to the Fellowship, to Taliesin and to Wrieto-San himself I couldn’t have imagined any other way of life—if my father hadn’t come through I think I would have gone out and robbed a bank in order to stay on. Truly. I do. It’s difficult to explain, but the fact of the matter is that in all eras, whether prosperous or constrained, people—especially young people, and I
was
young then, young and unfinished—want desperately to find their niche, believe in a vision, belong to something greater than themselves. I was no different. I lived and breathed Taliesin. The sun rose in the east and lingered overhead for no other reason than to illumine those golden walls. Winter, spring, summer, the year rushed by so precipitately it was as if the days were fanned by a breeze in one of those filmic sequences that play havoc with the calendar. Was it October again? I couldn’t believe it. None of us could.
n the second year of the Fellowship, tuition rose from $675 to $1,100—a sixty-three percent increase—and I wrote my father for additional funds and my father indulged me. By this time, I was so thoroughly committed to the Fellowship, to Taliesin and to Wrieto-San himself I couldn’t have imagined any other way of life—if my father hadn’t come through I think I would have gone out and robbed a bank in order to stay on. Truly. I do. It’s difficult to explain, but the fact of the matter is that in all eras, whether prosperous or constrained, people—especially young people, and I
was
young then, young and unfinished—want desperately to find their niche, believe in a vision, belong to something greater than themselves. I was no different. I lived and breathed Taliesin. The sun rose in the east and lingered overhead for no other reason than to illumine those golden walls. Winter, spring, summer, the year rushed by so precipitately it was as if the days were fanned by a breeze in one of those filmic sequences that play havoc with the calendar. Was it October again? I couldn’t believe it. None of us could.
Though I’d been slim to begin with, I wound up losing eight pounds that first year. All the flaccidity of my student days was sweated out of me, sinew and muscle tautening in its place. My fingers were nicked and scarred, my thumbnail blackened with the errant thump of the hammer. I was tanned till my skin shone like a red Indian’s and I was as familiar with the teats of a cow and the grunts and odors of the pig wallow as if I’d been born with a stalk of grass between my front teeth and hayseed in my hair. And I could drive a nail, saw a board, split wood and plaster a wall as well as any man in the glorious state of Wisconsin. All this thanks to Wrieto-San’s hands-on approach and his ongoing impecuniosity that forced him to put his apprentices to work as a means of survival. Was it slave labor, as some have claimed? Perhaps. But there was a spirit of camaraderie, of all for one and one for all, that elevated our labors into the realm of the sublime, far above the reach of the carpers and critics, with their dwindling souls and limited imaginations. We were the acolytes, Wrieto-San was the Master. We lived to serve him.
My father wrote me a six-page letter adducing his objections to Wrieto-San’s regime—which, when distilled, amounted to a single rhetorical question: What was I doing milking cows and pitch-forking hay like a peasant in a hempen
kosode
and shit-caked
geta
when I should be designing buildings back home in Japan? He concluded with a proverb:
Kappa mo kawa nagare
(even a
kappa
—a water sprite—can get carried away by the river; i.e., anyone can make a mistake). With all respect to his paternal wisdom, not to mention the check he’d enclosed, I countered with
Sumeba miyako
(roughly: wherever you live, you come to love it). And I did love Taliesin as I’d never loved anything in my life, though I had to concede that I would have preferred a bit more time in the drafting room and a whole lot less at hard labor.
kosode
and shit-caked
geta
when I should be designing buildings back home in Japan? He concluded with a proverb:
Kappa mo kawa nagare
(even a
kappa
—a water sprite—can get carried away by the river; i.e., anyone can make a mistake). With all respect to his paternal wisdom, not to mention the check he’d enclosed, I countered with
Sumeba miyako
(roughly: wherever you live, you come to love it). And I did love Taliesin as I’d never loved anything in my life, though I had to concede that I would have preferred a bit more time in the drafting room and a whole lot less at hard labor.
At first, Wrieto-San had paid carpenters, stonemasons and farmhands from the surrounding villages at the rate of two dollars a day, plus meals, to carry forward the work on the Hillside School, which was then being converted to residences for the apprentices, as well as a theater and a new studio removed from the main house, but in this fourth year of the Depression, he’d had to let them go because he was, as always, flirting with bankruptcy. In fact, the only viable project on the boards at the time was the Willey house, and so, when we weren’t out in the fields or hammering away at Hillside, there was precious little to do in the drafting room but copy out Wrieto-San’s old designs by way of exercise and instruction.
Typically, our days would begin with the six-thirty bell followed by breakfast at seven. We ate communally, but for Wrieto-San and Mrs. Wright, who took their meals in a private dining room attached to the larger one reserved for the apprentices, and though we sometimes lacked for meat there were eggs, flapjacks and enough oatmeal to ballast a ship of the line (Wrieto-San believed firmly in the virtues of oatmeal, both as the body’s fuel and its scouring pad). In later years, once Svetlana graduated from musical prodigy to impresario, breakfast would be followed by half an hour’s choral practice under her direction, but in the fall of 1933, we went straight to work. There was an afternoon break from twelve to one-thirty, then work till five and dinner at six. On Saturday evenings we were all required to dress for dinner, after which those amongst us with musical abilities—I was not one of them—would perform for the assembled apprentices, Wrieto-San and his family and any prospective clients or other guests who happened to be in attendance. Sunday-morning breakfast was the reward after a long six-day week, and here there would be preserves, bacon, ham, eggs, biscuits and pie, and then there was the formal Sunday dinner in the incomparable living room, and we were all able to bask in the fully realized expression of organic architecture at its apex. Ten o’clock was lights out, enforced by the shutting down of the hydroelectric plant.
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