The Women (32 page)
CHAPTER 1: DIES IRAE
A
ugust 1914. There was a war on in Europe, the Archduke Ferdinand assassinated, the old alignments breaking down, trenches dug, want and terror and ruin spreading outward like ripples on the surface of a pond, but the rumor of it barely touched him. Nothing touched him. A week ago he’d been as secure and genuinely happy as he’d ever been in his life, Mamah blossoming along with Taliesin, working on a book of her own and winning over the neighbor women with her God-given grace and charm and the long trailing diminuendo of her laugh, the scandals behind them and the hounds of the press onto other shames and miseries, his own work on Midway Gardens coming to fruition in a last-minute frenzy of alterations, substitutions, delays and shortages and the mad concentrated efforts of a cadre of men working against deadline, just the way he liked it. But now he was alone. Taliesin was in ashes. And Mamah was dead.
ugust 1914. There was a war on in Europe, the Archduke Ferdinand assassinated, the old alignments breaking down, trenches dug, want and terror and ruin spreading outward like ripples on the surface of a pond, but the rumor of it barely touched him. Nothing touched him. A week ago he’d been as secure and genuinely happy as he’d ever been in his life, Mamah blossoming along with Taliesin, working on a book of her own and winning over the neighbor women with her God-given grace and charm and the long trailing diminuendo of her laugh, the scandals behind them and the hounds of the press onto other shames and miseries, his own work on Midway Gardens coming to fruition in a last-minute frenzy of alterations, substitutions, delays and shortages and the mad concentrated efforts of a cadre of men working against deadline, just the way he liked it. But now he was alone. Taliesin was in ashes. And Mamah was dead.
Past midnight on a day he couldn’t name—Monday, Tuesday, what difference did it make?—he was sitting on the hill above the ruins of the house, crickets alive around him, roaring as if their lives would never end and the frost never come, fireflies aping the stars overhead, the grass lush, the trees burdened with fruit and the bitter reek of ash hanging over everything. Five hundred copies of the Wasmuth portfolio, printed on the finest German stock, were still smoldering in the basement—even now he could segregate the smell of them, a thin persistent chemical stink of colored plates, elaborated plans and burned-out ideas—and when he turned his head he could see the deeper darkness, black smoke against the black sky and the dense textured shadows of the freestanding chimneys that were like the remains of a civilization gone down. Everything was still. And then, suddenly, a noise came at him, abrasive and harsh, the grind of boot heels amongst the cinders, and he caught his breath. There, a quick flare of light—a match lit and snuffed.
Joseph,
he thought,
it’s only Joseph,
the farmer’s son he’d hired to walk the property with a rifle to keep out the looters and anyone else who might want to do him harm.
Joseph,
he thought,
it’s only Joseph,
the farmer’s son he’d hired to walk the property with a rifle to keep out the looters and anyone else who might want to do him harm.
Further harm. Fatal harm. The Barbadian was in the Dodgeville jail, but who knew if he had collaborators, a whole army of disaffected Negroes in white service jackets hunkered in the bushes over their hatchets and knives? He almost wished it were so. At least then he could do something to release the grief and rage boiling up in him. Literally boiling up. His back, from tailbone on up into the hair at the nape of his neck, was a plague of boils, inflamed suppurating sores, and he’d never in his life suffered so much as a pimple or blemish. It was as if what the gossipmongers were saying was true and verifiable, that divine justice had come down on his head for violating the laws of God and man in taking Mamah outside of marriage and then compounding the sin by establishing her in Taliesin as if to rub all their noses in it. Mamah had paid the ultimate price, yet he’d been spared by a fluke of fate, away in Chicago and so pressed and harried he’d taken to sleeping right there on the job site in a pile of shavings. Spared, as the editorialists had it, so he could twist and suffer for the rest of his life. Arson, murder, desolation, boils. What next—frogs dropping down from the heavens? Locusts?
They called it sin, the preachers denouncing him from their pulpits, crowing, gloating, and the newspapermen right there alongside them, but was there any such thing? He didn’t believe in it any more than Mamah or Ellen Key did, not when it came to honest and loving relations between women and men, but how else could you explain what had happened? It was the God of Isaiah come down to lay his hand over the hillside, the God before whom Ein Tad
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had made him tremble when he was a boy. The words were on his lips now, involuntary and poisonous, but he could no more stop them than he could go back in time to stay the murderer’s hand: “ ‘The grass withereth,’ ” he said aloud, the sound of his voice an assault on the solitude of the night, “ ‘the flower fadeth, because the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass.’ ”
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had made him tremble when he was a boy. The words were on his lips now, involuntary and poisonous, but he could no more stop them than he could go back in time to stay the murderer’s hand: “ ‘The grass withereth,’ ” he said aloud, the sound of his voice an assault on the solitude of the night, “ ‘the flower fadeth, because the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass.’ ”
He’d buried her himself. In a plain pine box fashioned by Billy Weston with his two burned hands and gashed scalp and it was no trouble for Billy, the smallest thing, because Billy was making a box of his own, child-size, for his son Ernest, murdered alongside Mamah and the others and laid out on the stones like a burnt offering. The box stood there in the courtyard, smelling of sap and shavings, isolate and actual, a thing he could touch and feel and run his hands over. White pine. The planed edges. But it was too small, wasn’t it? Too reduced and confined for a spirit like hers, and his first thought was that Billy must have miscalculated. He kept stalking round it, unable to grasp the problem, to discover the solution in the conjoined boards and the light, shifting grain of the wood—architecture, it was only architecture—till his son John found him there. “Too small, too small,” he kept muttering, closer then to breaking down than at any time since he’d stepped off the train. “No, Papa,” John told him, “it’s just right,” and it was, he understood that finally. It was.
There were sickles hanging on hooks in the barn and he’d gone out there and fitted one to the grip of his hand, then took down the whetstone and sharpened the blade till it shone in the dense shifting August light. When he was satisfied he strode out to her flower garden and cut it to the ground in a fury of wide slashing strokes till his hands were wet with the ichor of the stems, a whole field of cut flowers lying there in sheaves, enough to fill a casket and a raw hole in the ground too. He chased off the undertaker. Chased them all off, the newspapermen, the farmers and their wives, the gawkers and gapers and bloodsuckers, the ones who never knew her and never would. He was the one who knew her, the only one, and he was the one who bent to bathe her in blooms, her own blooms, the ones she’d toiled over herself, petals opening to the sun and closed now forever.
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Then he hitched up the sorrel team and led the funeral procession down the drive from the scorched ruins, along the county road to the Lloyd Jones family chapel and the churchyard behind it.
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Then he hitched up the sorrel team and led the funeral procession down the drive from the scorched ruins, along the county road to the Lloyd Jones family chapel and the churchyard behind it.
The service was brief because there was nothing to say, not as far as he was concerned, the blow so heavy, the weight of the pain, the punishment, and then he sent them all away—his sister Jennie, his son John, his brother-in-law Andrew Porter and the handful of others—and took up the shovel himself. Her husband—her former husband, a decent man, decent enough—wasn’t there. Nor had he wanted to be. He was on the Chicago train, the train that stopped at every town and crossing, with two caskets of his own, caskets smaller even than the one Billy Weston had made for his son. There was the soft swish of the dirt sifting down into the hole, stones rattling against the planed corners of the box, the thump of a clod, a dangle of severed roots. Rain coming. The dirt smell. And then finally there was the raised mound and he was tamping it with the butt of the shovel, dusk closing down against a sky roiled with clouds. The heat—the August heat—settled in till it was like another kind of fire burning up out of the ground. When the rain did come sometime past midnight, he was still there and though it soaked him through to the skin, it never cooled him.
But now, as he sat in the wet grass of the hillside and watched the moving point of light that was Joseph Williams’ cigarette bisecting the planes of the night, a new feeling came over him, as if the ligature round his heart had been loosened by a single coil. She was dead and he wasn’t and no amount of brooding or sorrow could amend that. It was as if she’d never existed or existed in another sphere altogether, a kind of permanent limbo to which he had no access. She was gone, in spirit and flesh, but here was the concrete evidence of her—Taliesin. What was left of it, anyway, the studio and back rooms, the garages and stables standing forlorn and abandoned, the place of the hill no arsonist or murderer could ever eradicate. He’d built it for her, as a refuge from the loose tongues and prying eyes of the biddies and gossips and Sunday saints who’d made her life a hell, and in that moment he understood that he would build it again, all over again, as a monument to her.
It was the least he could do—or no, the only thing he could do, the right thing, the
moral
thing—and as he stared into the darkness where the main rooms had stood he was already devising plans against the backdrop of the night, seeing a new way to configure what had been razed to coordinate with the portion of the structure the fire had spared. And this was ordained too, else why had the conflagration stopped short of consuming the whole of the place if he hadn’t been meant to rebuild?
moral
thing—and as he stared into the darkness where the main rooms had stood he was already devising plans against the backdrop of the night, seeing a new way to configure what had been razed to coordinate with the portion of the structure the fire had spared. And this was ordained too, else why had the conflagration stopped short of consuming the whole of the place if he hadn’t been meant to rebuild?
When it came to it—and he was being honest with himself now—he’d never really been satisfied with the command of the rooms nor with the limited space for guests and workers, and here was an opportunity to expand on the original, make the grand rooms grander, improve the sweep of the views and build out to the southwest, elongating the foot of the reversed L that gave the house its shape within the structure of the hill, strengthening the lines, improving the flow
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. . . He’d add a new wing for guests and servants’ quarters and another for his aunts and his mother, just there, to the west. Enlarge the studio, redefine the courtyard. Make the space more intimate and expansive at the same time. He could see it all as if it were standing there before him, graced with light.
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. . . He’d add a new wing for guests and servants’ quarters and another for his aunts and his mother, just there, to the west. Enlarge the studio, redefine the courtyard. Make the space more intimate and expansive at the same time. He could see it all as if it were standing there before him, graced with light.
He was so caught up in the concept he couldn’t keep still and before he knew it he was rushing headlong in the dark, through the sodden grass and the clinging fabric of the night, down the slope and through the door to the studio, calling out to his watchman that it was all right, everything was all right. He had a rationale. He had a plan.
Mamah,
he would do it for Mamah. Spare nothing. Let the details dictate themselves, Taliesin II rising unshakably out of the ashes of Taliesin I as if Isaiah’s Lord were the mildest and gentlest of shepherds leading the way.
Mamah,
he would do it for Mamah. Spare nothing. Let the details dictate themselves, Taliesin II rising unshakably out of the ashes of Taliesin I as if Isaiah’s Lord were the mildest and gentlest of shepherds leading the way.
He lingered there a week, eating little, sleeping less. The sores burst and his shirt stuck to his skin. He paced round the ruins, raked through the ashes for the charred fragments of his pottery, rode horseback over the hills, hair streaming and cape flying till he could have been a figure summoned by the Brontës, grieving all the while and yet planning too, the images coming to him in a flood he couldn’t stop. But plans meant nothing sans the wherewithal to realize them, and at the end of the week he left orders with Billy Weston for the cleanup and went back to Chicago. And work.
At the time he was living in a rented house at 25 East Cedar Street, and when he returned he resolutely kept his mother at arm’s length (he was grieving; he needed to be alone), and resisted overtures from his daughter Catherine (couldn’t he use her help with the housekeeping?) even as he fought Kitty over his monthly payments to her and the disposition of the house in Oak Park where they’d raised the children together. There were projects on the board.
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People were making demands on him. The flow of funds at Midway Gardens had fallen off to a trickle, the finish work stalled even as audiences gathered every evening in an arena that cried out for completion. From the press he absorbed the sort of abuse to which he thought he’d become inured—LOVE BUNGALOW KILLINGS; WILD NEGRO CHEF SLAYS 7; WRIGHT AFFINITY SLAIN—but he felt he had no choice but to issue a statement to controvert the assaults on Mamah’s character, a woman who was better and stronger and more willing to live her ideals than any woman he’d ever known.
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People were making demands on him. The flow of funds at Midway Gardens had fallen off to a trickle, the finish work stalled even as audiences gathered every evening in an arena that cried out for completion. From the press he absorbed the sort of abuse to which he thought he’d become inured—LOVE BUNGALOW KILLINGS; WILD NEGRO CHEF SLAYS 7; WRIGHT AFFINITY SLAIN—but he felt he had no choice but to issue a statement to controvert the assaults on Mamah’s character, a woman who was better and stronger and more willing to live her ideals than any woman he’d ever known.
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In the midst of all this, he made the smallest of decisions—a staffing matter, nothing really, the sort of thing he’d dealt with a thousand times over the years—and another woman came into his life. He’d asked around about a housekeeper, someone efficient, quiet, reliable, who could see to his needs in Chicago and then in Spring Green when the renovation started—he was adrift without Mamah there to look after him. The dishes were a nuisance, piled up around the house with unrecognizable crusts of food fused to their surfaces, the rugs were filthy, the linens needed changing, he was running short of shirts and underwear—socks—and he was tired of having to send someone out to the laundry every other day. The smallest thing. That was all he needed. Someone to look after him.
The morning after he’d put out his inquiries—very early, before he’d even shaved or had a chance to think about eggs, frying pans and maple-cured bacon from the butcher down the street—there was a knock at the door. He was half inclined to ignore it. Who could it be at this hour—a newspaperman hoping to provoke him into providing copy for the evening edition? A creditor demanding payment? Fresh bad news? “Just a minute!” he shouted down the hall from the bathroom. And then, his voice rising in irritation, “Who is it?”
There was no answer, but the banging at the door continued, grew in volume even. He came out into the hall, beginning to feel alarmed—his nerves were on edge, of course they were—and he called out again. He glanced at his watch. It was quarter past six. Continued banging, peremptory, outraged. He went to the door and jerked it open.
A tiny wizened woman was standing there on the stoop, her shoulders rounded, her pale blue eyes rising up to him like gas bubbles in a bottle of seltzer water. She was dressed entirely in black, with button-up shoes and a bonnet out of the last century.
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