The Women (50 page)
We could have gone to Milwaukee or Madison, I suppose, but we wanted a taste of the real thing, of jazz music, eclectic cuisine, the crush of people, and we never thought twice about it—Chicago was the only place to go. No one would recognize us there, and if we kept our displays of affection private, there was no reason to think that anyone would notice us either—or take exception to what we represented as a couple. They might think that I was a foreign exchange student (which, in a sense, I was) and Daisy the daughter of the family that had sponsored me (which, in a sense, she was) or perhaps a sister of mercy, an interpreter of Asiatic languages, a sightseeing guide with a soft spot for handsome, cultivated Japanese men.
“I want a beer—and a whiskey—in one of those speakeasies Al Capone shot up,” was the first thing she said to me after we’d checked into our very modest hotel, separately, in our separate rooms, though it sickened me to have to pay double for the sake of appearances. “I want to see the holes in the walls. I want to run this little finger”—she held up her index finger—“round one of those holes. Just for the thrill of it.”
“Sure,” I said, “me too. I can be a gangster and you can be my moll—do you want to be my moll?”
We were waiting for the elevator. There was no one around. I leaned in close and kissed her even before she slid her skirt up one leg to expose an imaginary garter and said “
Sí, certo,
of course I’ll be your moll,
signore,
” because we were like two kids playacting and I loved the way her eyes widened and her lips parted in expectation. We were in Chicago. We were free. And we had the whole afternoon and evening ahead of us, and two heady days beyond that.
Sí, certo,
of course I’ll be your moll,
signore,
” because we were like two kids playacting and I loved the way her eyes widened and her lips parted in expectation. We were in Chicago. We were free. And we had the whole afternoon and evening ahead of us, and two heady days beyond that.
I somehow got the notion that we should at least drive past the scene of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, which was on the north side, in the Lincoln Park area, and at that moment, truthfully, I’d forgotten all about Wrieto-San. Deep down, buried in some back room of my consciousness, I knew that he was somewhere out there in the confusion of pedestrians, streetcars, towering buildings and sun-striped boulevards, that he was very likely stopping at the Congress Hotel or paying a surprise visit to the Robie house or taking the air on Michigan Avenue, but I left the knowledge there. We climbed into the Cherokee-red Bearcat in the warm atomized sweetness of the late afternoon and let the breeze wash over us as I fought my way through the welter of cars and did my best to ignore the hooting horns and the double takes of one driver or another. The top was down. Of course it was down. It was summer. In Chicago. And we were out in the thick of it.
As I’ve said, I wasn’t much of a driver, and though I’d gained confidence on the backroads of Wisconsin, negotiating big-city traffic was another thing altogether. We were lost almost immediately—we never did find the St. Valentine’s garage or a tavern with holes in the walls, but we did manage a few beers in a bar and grill so murky and grime-encrusted it could have been the real thing. There were discolored flecks of some glutinous substance decorating the wall behind the table, which Daisy, lighting a cigarette in perfect nonchalance, claimed was blood but was more likely just catsup. Or marinara sauce, in keeping with the clientele. We ordered sandwiches, listened to the jukebox, kept our hands to ourselves. Nonetheless—I think we were on our third beer at the time—one of the patrons at the bar, who’d been speaking an animated Italian with his cronies, lurched over to our table and accused me of being a Chinaman, which I hotly denied. I didn’t like his face. I didn’t like his eyes. And things could have gotten violent very quickly if Daisy hadn’t taken hold of my arm and jerked me through the door and out onto the street as if I were a limp fish she’d caught on the end of a very taut line.
At any rate, the beers didn’t improve my sense of direction—or my sense of coordination with respect to gear shift, clutch and steering wheel, those essential tools of the road master—and we were lost on the way back too. I did manage to locate Lake Shore Drive and found a street heading west off of it that looked vaguely familiar even as Daisy insisted she’d never seen it before. It was then—and we weren’t quarreling, not really, though we were both, I think, frustrated by the endless detouring, backtracking, lurching and bucking, and eager to get back to the hotel—that I spotted Wrieto-San. We were stuck in a line of cars at a stoplight, the fall of day thickening the shadows in the alleyways, exhaust rising hellishly round us, and he was on the far side of the street, swaggering along in his usual way, twirling his walking stick, chatting with Mrs. Wright and a round-shouldered man in a gray suit who followed half a step behind. In that moment, Daisy saw him too. She let out an expostulation—or more of a squeak, actually—then ducked her head down beneath the dash, compressing her shoulders and pinching her knees together so tightly I was afraid she was going to burrow down through the floorboards and into the pavement beneath.
I held absolutely rigid, as if by freezing myself in space and time I could render myself invisible or at least inconspicuous—daylight
was
closing down and there were cars and people everywhere to provide cover—but then how inconspicuous could the only Japanese on the street hope to be? Especially as he was presented centerstage in a Stutz Bearcat automobile in the one shade of color most likely to attract the Master’s eye? Don’t ask. Because I wouldn’t want to have to answer the question myself. At any rate, the denouement had Wrieto-San and his party passing by, apparently oblivious, till he turned the corner and was gone.
was
closing down and there were cars and people everywhere to provide cover—but then how inconspicuous could the only Japanese on the street hope to be? Especially as he was presented centerstage in a Stutz Bearcat automobile in the one shade of color most likely to attract the Master’s eye? Don’t ask. Because I wouldn’t want to have to answer the question myself. At any rate, the denouement had Wrieto-San and his party passing by, apparently oblivious, till he turned the corner and was gone.
I never had the courage to ask him if he’d seen me that day—seen us—even after the war when I came back to visit at Taliesin. He gave no sign of it when he and Mrs. Wright returned at the end of the week (and Daisy and I were hard at work on the upkeep of the place, taking our turns with the dishes and the hogs and all the other tasks the apprentices were assigned on a rotating schedule), but it was shortly thereafter that he strode into the drafting room one morning in his full regalia, beret, cape, jodhpurs and elevated shoes, and announced that he was leaving to inspect a building site in Wichita. “Wes,” he called out, “and, uh, Tadashi—I’ll need you to come along. Pack some things. We leave in five minutes.”
When we returned four days later, Daisy was nowhere to be found.
At first I didn’t understand—I went straight to her room, bursting with news of the trip, but no one answered my knock. Pushing the door open, I thrust my head in the room and saw, with a shock, that it had been stripped bare. Her books, her watercolors and hangings, her cosmetics, shoes, magazines and newspapers were gone—even the covers from her bed. Dumbfounded, I went to the wardrobe. There was nothing there but for one crumpled woolen sock in the back corner—and yes, I snatched it up and held it to my nose, desperate suddenly for the scent of her, thinking all the while that there must be some simple explanation, that she’d switched rooms, perhaps over to Hillside or even upstairs, where the views were more amenable. For all her cigarette smoking and urban tastes, Daisy loved the views down the long valley at Taliesin and on more than one occasion she’d told me how jealous she was of Gwendolyn because Gwendolyn had been assigned the room above hers, on the second floor.
I took the stairs two at time. It was late in the afternoon, windows open wide, ladybugs floating randomly up the stairwell, the sound of someone’s gramophone running a naked wire through the atmosphere (Borodin’s Second String Quartet, and I can never hear its sobbing strains without thinking of her, of Daisy, my Daisy, and the infinite sadness of that day). Gwendolyn was sprawled across her bed, still sweating from her exertions in the fields, and though I was so worked up I didn’t think to knock, she didn’t seem at all surprised to find me standing there in the doorway. “It was her father,” she said, without bothering to get up. “Mrs. Wright called him—that’s what everybody’s saying—and he showed up in some sort of fancy car, maybe a Duesenberg or something like that. I barely got to say two words to her, let alone goodbye.”
She was studying the look on my face as if she were a student of the human physiognomy, as if she were mentally measuring me for a marble bust. She’d never much liked me because I’d never much liked her. I tried to say something, but couldn’t seem to get the words out. “What,” she said, all innocence, “didn’t she tell you?”
I skipped dinner that night and hiked out to Stuffy’s to use the pay telephone there. I lost a pocketful of change before I finally got through to her, at her father’s house in Pittsburgh. When she answered, her voice was dead and all I could think was that she’d been drugged. “It’s me,” I said. “I’m coming to you.”
“No,” she said, far away from me, very far, farther than I could have imagined. “You can’t. My father—”
“To hell with your father.” (I wasn’t given to foul language, but I was beside myself.)
“He won’t let me—and my mother either. They’re threatening Mr. Wright with a lawsuit.”
“A lawsuit? For what? Because we love each other?” I looked away absently as a man in overalls and a cloven hat swung through the door and into the tavern. The sun spread yolk over the glass of the phonebooth. It was so hot I felt like a candle burned down to the wick. “You’re twenty years old. They can’t stop us. Nobody can.”
I listened to her breathing over the line. “Tadashi,” she said finally, “you don’t understand. I can’t see you anymore. They’re sending me to London, to stay with my Uncle Peter and Aunt Margaret—I’m going to study design at the Royal Academy. Or at least that’s the idea.”
“London?” I pictured a Dickensian scene, Daisy selling matchsticks on the street, huddled in a garret. My mind was racing. “When?” I said, and I was begging now, stalling for time, trying to calculate the distance from Taliesin to Pittsburgh, a place I’d never been to and of which I had only the vaguest geographic notion.
“Day after tomorrow.”
“But why?” I demanded, yet I already knew the answer to that question, just as I’d known with the girl in college, just as I’d known from the minute Daisy and I laid eyes on each other. Japanese were personae non gratae in this country, the Issei forever barred from attaining citizenship on racial grounds alone, whereas Swedes, Germans, even Italians and Greeks were welcome. “Is it because I’m not white? Is that it?”
She was a long time answering, and all the while a hurricane of pops, scratches and whistles howled through the line, and when she did answer her voice was so reduced I scarcely knew she was speaking. She said, “Yes,” in the way she might have dropped a pebble in the ocean. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
Of course, all this happened a very long time ago and I’m aware that it is peripheral to the task at hand, which is to give as full a portrait of Wrieto-San as I can, and I don’t wish to dwell on the negative, not at all. Suffice to say that I stayed on at Taliesin, grudgingly at first (and perhaps I should have defied Wrieto-San and Daisy’s father and all the rest of the world and driven through the night to Pittsburgh and held her to me so tightly no one could ever have torn us apart, but that sort of demonstrative behavior, is, I’m afraid, alien to me), and then, as the weeks, months and years wore on, in the way of humility and acceptance. Increasingly I came to an ever deeper understanding of the true meaning of apprenticeship and the sacrifice required in service of a great master, and I salved my wounds in the analgesic of work.
Which is precisely why I’d like to relate a happier experience from this period, one in which Wrieto-San again called on me to travel with him on business. It must have been in 1937 or 1938—my memory and the notes I’ve saved from that time are in conflict here—but it was certainly before the great gulf of the war came between us. Wrieto-San, as it happened, was in need of a new automobile—or to be more precise, two new automobiles. We were by then caravanning annually to Taliesin West, which tended to take a toll on our vehicles, and this was the ostensible rationale for our trip to the automobile dealer’s showroom in Chicago, but, in fact, as has been indicated above, Wrieto-San didn’t concern himself so much with needs as he did with wants. He wanted the newest model of Lincoln automobile, the Lincoln Zephyr, and when Wrieto-San wanted something, he always—always, without fail—got it.
I suppose he brought me along that day as a sort of foil, a strange face to put the salesman off his guard, but of course I saw nothing of that—I was simply pleased and honored to be at his side, no matter my function. In any case, he strutted grandly through the door of the showroom, tricked out in all his Beaux Arts finery, the ends of his senatorial tie flowing and his cane tapping at the gleaming tiles of the floor, while I brought up the rear. The salesman—a sort of Babbitt-type, portly, glowing, pleased with himself—came sailing out of the office and across the floor like a liner out on the sea, his hand outstretched in greeting. He could see in a moment that Wrieto-San was someone great, a dynamo, a prince among men, but I’m not sure if he recognized him at first.
“Yes,” Wrieto-San said, studying the man’s hand a moment before clenching it in his own, “I’ve come for this car.” He used his cane as a pointer. The Zephyr stood there in all its aerodynamic beauty, with its grill of chrome shining like the teeth of some fierce predatory animal, the skirts that extended the sculpted chassis and the long tapering wonder of the cab. It was a magnificent thing, elegant and brutal at the same time, its hood concealing the peerless V-12 engine that would tear up the road and transform its competitors into tiny gleams in the rearview mirror. I saw it and wanted it myself. Anyone would have. It was the pinnacle of automotive perfection.
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