The Women (51 page)
“Good,” the salesman said, rubbing his hands together in anticipation of his commission, and then he launched into a fulsome speech about the car’s features and reliability, going on at such length that Wrieto-San, exasperated, finally cut him off.
“Can it be that you don’t recognize me?” he said.
“Why, yes”—the salesman faltered—“of course I do.”
I heard my own voice then, though I’d intended to remain silent—and watchful. “Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright,” I said, and I had to restrain myself from bowing.
The man slapped his forehead. “Mr. Wright,” he intoned, as if he were offering up a prayer, “of course, of course. It’s an honor, sir, a great honor.” And then he was pumping Wrieto-San’s hand all over again.
When he was finished, when he got done wriggling and grinning and running a hand through his hair and straightening his tie, he stared expectantly at Wrieto-San, who gave me one of his patented looks (we apprentices liked to call it the boa-constrictor-swallowing-the-rat look), then turned back to the salesman. “I’ll want two of them,” he pronounced. “And I’ll want them cut off here”—an abrupt slashing movement of the cane that sliced an imaginary line from the windshield to the rear window—“so that convertible tops can be installed.” He paused. “They’ll need to be painted, of course, in Cherokee red,” he added, turning to me. “Tadashi, you have the color sample, do you not?”
“Yes, Wrieto-San,” I said, and this time I did bow as I handed over the sheet of paper decorated with the red square.
And then, as that seemed to have concluded the business, Wrieto-San turned to leave, but stopped before he’d gone five steps. “Oh, yes,” he said, his voice as self-assured as any senator’s on the stump, “I’ll want delivery within the month. And I won’t be paying. You do understand that, don’t you?”
We got a great deal of use out of those cars. They were every bit as powerful and rugged—not to mention elegant—as advertised. And they were especially useful for longer treks—to Arizona, to visit clients and construction sites in the late thirties and early forties, when we were busily engaged with the building of Florida Southern College, the Community Church in Kansas City, the Sturges House in California and any number of other far-flung projects. And, of course, their performance was all the more satisfying because Wrieto-San did not pay a nickel for them, nor was he expected to. Just as he’d calculated, the Lincoln Automotive Company was delighted to advertise just what make and model the world’s greatest architect chose to drive.
This anecdote, illustrative as it is both of Wrieto-San’s magnetism and his audacity, brings me to the darkest period of my time with him, if you except the contretemps over Daisy. I’m referring now to events that went far beyond the scale of what any of us at Taliesin or anywhere else in America could have imagined or foreseen—that is, the bombing of Pearl Harbor by my native people, and the consequences it had for me, a Japanese national living by dint of a student visa in the trammeled hills of Wisconsin. Nothing could have protected me from the backlash, not even the power and influence of Wrieto-San himself. Looking back on it, I don’t know that any of us could have done anything differently.
The year prior to the “sneak attack,” as the press liked to call it, I’d gone down to the local police department to register and have my fingerprints taken as required by Section 31 of the Alien Registration Act, but I really hadn’t thought much about it. The militarists in my country had been rattling their sabers, as had their counterparts in Germany and Italy, and it seemed a reasonable precaution on the part of the U.S. government to attempt to keep an eye on citizens of the belligerent countries despite the fact that war had not yet been declared. I suppose I did feel a degree of shame over the posturing of my countrymen (not to mention the savage and dehumanizing way they were depicted in the American press, which, of course, lumped all Japanese in the same barbarian’s boat regardless of outlook or cultural attainments), and yet the experience of registering alongside a dozen or so local Italians and Germans wasn’t particularly troublesome or traumatic in any way. In fact, on that wintry afternoon nearly a year and a half later—December seventh, that is—I’d forgotten entirely about it.
I remember coming in to lunch just after the bell had rung, only to find the dining room deserted. Puzzled, I poked my head in the kitchen. No one was there, not even Mabel, who was as much a fixture of the place as its furniture. The stove was hot, a cauldron of soup steaming atop it, the room warm and redolent. Coffee was brewing. There was half a sliced ham on the countertop and several loaves of bread cooling beside it. Dishcloths, vegetable peels, ladles, knives and all the rest of the culinary appurtenances were scattered about in evidence of recent activity. But no Mabel. And no sign of the apprentice who was to serve as
sous
-chef and
plongeur
—or any of my colleagues, who should by that time have been bellying up to the counter with their plates in hand. I went to the window to peer out into the yard (this was at Hillside, where most of the apprentices were now living and working) to see if some disaster had struck in the time it had taken me to leave the drafting room, cross the property to the main house to fetch the set of plans Wrieto-San had sent me for and make my way back again.
sous
-chef and
plongeur
—or any of my colleagues, who should by that time have been bellying up to the counter with their plates in hand. I went to the window to peer out into the yard (this was at Hillside, where most of the apprentices were now living and working) to see if some disaster had struck in the time it had taken me to leave the drafting room, cross the property to the main house to fetch the set of plans Wrieto-San had sent me for and make my way back again.
It was then that the sound of the radio came to me across the intervening spaces of the building. Herbert’s radio. He had a new Zenith in his room, a very powerful receiver with terrific sound quality and an extended aerial he’d fashioned himself, and we often gathered there to listen to programs at night, but here it was the middle of the day—lunchtime—and I could only wonder at that. I moved toward the sound as if in a trance. The sound grew louder. I heard voices raised in excitement and someone crying “Shush!” as the announcer thundered out the news and then I was there, framed in the doorway in astonishment: Herbert’s room was a scrum of humanity, everyone—even Mabel, even Wrieto-San—wedged in as tightly as commuters on the subway.
The radio crackled ominously. Someone glanced up at me—Wes. “Did you hear?” he said, and they all looked up now, no trace of irony or even awareness in his voice—he was delivering information, that was all:
Did you hear?
Did you hear?
“Hear what?” I said. “What is it?”
“The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.”
Wrieto-San, as I’m sure so many readers are aware, was a pacifist. During the war years he advised his apprentices to declare themselves conscientious objectors and at least two of them that I know of—John Howe and Herbert Mohl—were imprisoned as a result. Wrieto-San stuck by them. He visited them in jail, sent them foodstuffs, letters, books and other amusements. So it was with me as well. Within an hour of the initial broadcasts, after we’d dined and got back to work in the drafting room, he took me aside. “Tadashi,” he said, “I’m very sorry about all this, this—unfortunate—business.” And he was sorry indeed, not only for the madness that was to come, the loss of life and destruction, but because he so genuinely admired the cultures of the powers the United States and its allies had aligned against. Certainly if the war had been with Australia or Indonesia or the Belgian Congo he would have opposed it, but this went even deeper, this saddened him so that his voice shook and lost its timbre. He looked up at me. We were standing just beyond the doorway to the drafting room, out of sight of the others. “You know what this means, don’t you? ”
I wasn’t thinking. Call me naïve, but I never dreamed that the Americans among whom I’d lived and worked for so long now would see me as a threat to the national security. Or—more significantly—that I would be forced to leave Taliesin, the only sanctuary I’d fully embraced in all my life, the place that was more a home to me than Tokyo itself, and the man who was, at this juncture, as much my father as the man who’d sired me. I was about to slip the question back to him like the baton in a relay race, to say,
No, what does it mean?,
when his face told me. I was going into exile. Going to prison.
No, what does it mean?,
when his face told me. I was going into exile. Going to prison.
“They’ll be coming for you,” he said. “And by God”—his eyes flared—“I’ll do everything in my power to keep them off of this property, but I’m afraid it’s not going to do much good. Not in the end.”
“But isn’t it possible—?” I protested. I let my arm sweep forward to suggest all that was or should have been included in that realm of possibility, that they would see me as the harmless architectural apprentice I was, as a devotee of Taliesin and a follower of one Master only, and that against all reason or expectation I would be allowed to stay on and assist in the great work of Wrieto-San and humanity itself.
He took a moment. I could hear my fellow apprentices chattering away excitedly, war in the air, this place Pearl Harbor stamped suddenly in all our minds though none of us could have pinpointed it on a map the day before. “You might want to think about Canada.”
A picture of that vast polar country came to me—a place I’d never been to, but which seemed an eternal wintry Wisconsin spread from one sea to the other—and my dubiety must have shown on my face.
Wrieto-San reached out his hand then and laid it on my shoulder, a gesture I will always remember for the spontaneous warmth of it, as Wrieto-San was never physical with anyone, always standing erect and proper and respecting what today would be called one’s personal space. “Whatever you need,” he said. “Anything. Just ask.” He dropped his hand and shoved it deep into his pocket, then turned and strode back into the drafting room, crying out, “Good God, it’s like a meat locker in here! Can’t any of you keep up a fire?”
The next day, though it was snowing and Taliesin loomed amidst the frozen landscape like an ark locked in the fastness of an unreachable sea, they came for me. Two men from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, showing badges and faces as grim as boot heels. I’d thought of hiding in the stables, of asking Herbert or Wes to lie for me and say I’d fled to Canada, but that was the way of cowardice, not honor. That was the way that would have implicated them—and Wrieto-San—and I couldn’t take it. Instead, though I was as close to tears as I’ve ever been in my adult life, I came forward, striding purposefully through that miracle of organic architecture and aesthetic purity, and bowed to the two men in the heavy twill suits and tan overcoats.
Shikata ga nai,
is what I said to myself—it can’t be helped. And then I bowed to Wrieto-San, to Mrs. Wright and my fellow apprentices who’d gathered there in the living room as if for a Saturday night’s entertainment, and gave myself up to the snow and my innocence and the two steely representatives of the country my country had wronged.
Shikata ga nai,
is what I said to myself—it can’t be helped. And then I bowed to Wrieto-San, to Mrs. Wright and my fellow apprentices who’d gathered there in the living room as if for a Saturday night’s entertainment, and gave myself up to the snow and my innocence and the two steely representatives of the country my country had wronged.
But I see, once again, that I’ve gone on too long here. Suffice to say that I experienced the usual abuses and deprivations, the local jail (or should I say hoosegow?) at first, then, after President Roosevelt issued his infamous executive order 9066, removal to a relocation center in Arkansas and finally to the Tule Lake camp in the north of California, where the most radical and suspect aliens were interned. I won’t take time here to describe the appalling conditions of the uninsulated tarpaper barracks into which we were crowded, the lack of cooking facilities or waste and sewage disposal, the threats and insults of the guards or the anomalous and quite mad fact that hundreds of South American Japanese, many of whom no longer even spoke the language of Dai Nippon, were extradited and interned with us. Nor will I say anything about the national administrator of the internment program, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, except to repeat his rationale for all this suffering, humiliation and deprivation of basic human rights not only for resident aliens like myself but for the Nisei who were born in America—that is, “A Jap’s a Jap.”
Wrieto-San wrote me from time to time. My fellow apprentices, many of whom enlisted and went off to fight despite Wrieto-San’s disapproval, sent me books and foodstuffs and for Christmas that first year a quart bottle of Canadian Club reserve whiskey that smelled, tasted and went down like the pure distillate of freedom itself. Still, for long stretches of time that seemed as vast as the desert scrub that fell away from the two knobs of desiccated rock that were all we had to stare at, I didn’t care what became of me. I’d lost Taliesin. Lost Wrieto-San. Lost my dignity and status as a human being. If I’d known then how long the war would go on or that the scene in the courtyard would be the last time I’d lay eyes on Wrieto-San till after it was over, I don’t think I would have been able to endure.
But of course I did endure—that is what we are put on this earth to do. We Japanese have a saying,
Ame futte ji katamaru:
the ground that is rained upon hardens. Or, if you like, adversity builds character. So it was with me. I read, learned to cook, worked the vegetable patches we planted that first spring, helped to insulate and fortify the barracks, putting to use everything I’d learned at Taliesin, from my farming skills to the hands-on construction techniques that Wrieto-San, in his casual way, expected us to develop sui generis. And I drew—drew a whole lifetime’s worth of work. Plans for houses, industrial buildings, imaginary cities every bit as bold as Wrieto-San’s Broadacre City (the model of which I had the honor and privilege of working on at Taliesin), anything to bank the fires of creation against the bleakness and destruction that was my life during those years.
Ame futte ji katamaru:
the ground that is rained upon hardens. Or, if you like, adversity builds character. So it was with me. I read, learned to cook, worked the vegetable patches we planted that first spring, helped to insulate and fortify the barracks, putting to use everything I’d learned at Taliesin, from my farming skills to the hands-on construction techniques that Wrieto-San, in his casual way, expected us to develop sui generis. And I drew—drew a whole lifetime’s worth of work. Plans for houses, industrial buildings, imaginary cities every bit as bold as Wrieto-San’s Broadacre City (the model of which I had the honor and privilege of working on at Taliesin), anything to bank the fires of creation against the bleakness and destruction that was my life during those years.
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