The Women (60 page)
“Listen to me,” he said, insistent now. “Think of the Villa Medici in Fiesole. Remember how the walls looked as if they’d grown up out of the ground like the trees and the feeling we had there, the contentment, the way the light struck them and everywhere you looked there were vistas, and they were different through each turning of the sun, eleven o’clock a miracle, three o’clock, six in the evening? That’s what I’m going to give you. That’s your refuge. With me. And who gives a damn what anybody says.” He was trembling, burning up with it, the vision of that place to come rising before him in a luminous shimmer of conception. “I want you back,” he said, and if his tone was sharp and peremptory it was because he wasn’t pleading anymore, wasn’t making excuses—excuses were for little people, frightened people, people without command or direction. “This is ridiculous, this separation. I want you there. Soon. As soon as the roof’s up. Promise me. Enough of this.”
She didn’t answer. She just stared at him a long moment. Then she rose, took him by the hand and led him into the bedroom.
Two and a half weeks later he was back in Oak Park, back to the charade, and nothing and everything had changed. Kitty was as furious as ever, rattling things in the kitchen, squaring her shoulders when she came through the door like a boxer stepping into the ring, scalding him with one look or another—a whole repertoire of frowns and scowls and visual crucifixions—and berating him every chance she got. Why had he had to go back to Germany? Were the problems so insurmountable that Herr Wasmuth couldn’t have handled them on his own, because he was the publisher, after all, wasn’t he? Was
she
there? Had he run to her, slept with her, made her promises? And where was the money for the bills? Could he even begin to imagine the humiliation she had to go through just to put food on the table? And then there were the children with their needs and demands and their incessant clomping up and down the stairs, the whole mad cart-wheeling circus, creditors popping up like so many jacks-in-the-box, no work coming in, nothing.
she
there? Had he run to her, slept with her, made her promises? And where was the money for the bills? Could he even begin to imagine the humiliation she had to go through just to put food on the table? And then there were the children with their needs and demands and their incessant clomping up and down the stairs, the whole mad cart-wheeling circus, creditors popping up like so many jacks-in-the-box, no work coming in, nothing.
All that, yes, but it was worth it, it was endurable, because he was sure of Mamah now, sure she was coming back to him, and he was only waiting for the snow to recede and the ground to thaw so that he could do what he lived to do: build. In the meanwhile, he oversaw the work at Oak Park, petitioned for clients, mollified his mother and avoided Kitty as much as possible, taking long walks with only his stick for company, riding horseback, driving the streets like a daredevil and not giving two damns whether anybody got out of the way of him or not. And, of course, he drew—sketches, elevations, sections, floor plans—until the house, his and Mamah’s house, began to disclose its form. He looked out the window on the gray streets, snow giving way to sleet and then a cold rain that fell through the end of March and into April, mud, the season of mud, but then the wind shifted to the north and the snow fell again and every trace of spring was obliterated.
He’d begun to think a new ice age had come to haunt him—he even joked about it with Billy Little, the carpenter he brought up to Spring Green with him to contemplate the snow fields—but finally the days began to stretch out, the birds came back, the trees flamed with buds and the crocuses pushed up out of the tatters of the receding snow. He let it be known that he was assembling a crew to build a modest little house—for his mother, strictly for his mother, because if word got out the press would be all over him, suspecting the truth of the matter, and God only knew but that the community would rise up into the bargain—and he hired an Irish-man, Johnnie Vaughn, as chief carpenter. Johnnie had the ability to talk, chew and swing a hammer for hours on end without appearing to draw breath—and while a talker rarely made a good worker,
156
Johnnie was the exception, a brilliant organizer who worked without stint and knew every artisan and laborer within a twenty-mile radius. He brought in Ben Davis, the single most creative cusser the world has ever known, to oversee the stonework and the wagons to haul the slabs from the quarry, and Ben in turn recommended the two best men in the county, old Dad Signola, the Czech, and Father Larsen, the Norwegian, and no one could say which was the older. Their fingers were splayed and bludgeoned, their backs stooped, their hair a pure patriarchal white. Dad and Father. They knew stone, knew nothing but, and they were unerring and true, and Frank felt lucky to have them. Good men, good men all, and day by day the camaraderie of purpose growing into the joy and mission of the work.
156
Johnnie was the exception, a brilliant organizer who worked without stint and knew every artisan and laborer within a twenty-mile radius. He brought in Ben Davis, the single most creative cusser the world has ever known, to oversee the stonework and the wagons to haul the slabs from the quarry, and Ben in turn recommended the two best men in the county, old Dad Signola, the Czech, and Father Larsen, the Norwegian, and no one could say which was the older. Their fingers were splayed and bludgeoned, their backs stooped, their hair a pure patriarchal white. Dad and Father. They knew stone, knew nothing but, and they were unerring and true, and Frank felt lucky to have them. Good men, good men all, and day by day the camaraderie of purpose growing into the joy and mission of the work.
It was June, the foundations laid and the stone running on up into the chimneys and walling off the four courtyards so that the skeleton of the house was visible, all stone, nothing but stone, Druidic, antediluvian, organic in the best and original sense, and he worked right alongside the men, singing the body electric and as full of joy as he’d ever been. This was what he was born for. This was what made sense. The only thing.
He was directing the man from the lumberyard one early morning, the cart overloaded and the horses fighting for traction on the muddy slope up from the road, unable for the life of him to fathom why they couldn’t have hired somebody at least halfway competent to sit there and hold on to the reins and watch the big sweating fly-speckled rumps do the work for him, when there was a tap at his shoulder and he swung round to see Johnnie Vaughn standing there, grinning wide, and another man beside him. This second man looked to be about thirty or so, tall and round-shouldered, with the brim of his porkpie hat pulled down over the frames of his spectacles and his arm in a sling and a white plaster cast projecting from it like a ramrod. “Mr. Wright,” Johnnie was saying, “Boss, I want you to meet the new man, best carpenter in the state of Wisconsin, better than me even, better than anybody. Wait till you see the way he goes at it. Right? Right, Billy? ”
You had to trust your instincts—that was what he always told himself and told everybody else too. He’d hired and fired and goaded and pleaded with and laid down the law to a thousand men over the years, and he prided himself on taking in a man at a single glance. He liked what he saw, the worn overalls washed till the fibers showed through, the flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the cotton undershirt showing white at the collar, everything about him neat and clean, even the sling, even the cast. But how could the man expect to work with his arm broken? He wanted to ask, but instead he grinned and said, “Another Billy?”
The man reached out his hand—the left—for an awkward handshake and flicked his chin so that the brim of the hat rode up and his eyes, as gray as the water in the cistern, glanced out from behind the spectacles. “Billy Weston,” he said, and then added, “master carpenter.”
“I know what you’re thinking, Mr. Wright,” Johnnie put in. “But the cast comes off in two weeks and I’ll swear to you Billy’ll outwork any man on this place with one arm tied behind him—or, well, you know what I mean. He’s a good man. I’m vouching for him.”
Just then, Ben Davis, who’d started down the hill to castigate the idiot in the wagon, let out a string of polysyllabic curses questioning the fellow’s sanity, his mother’s mores and his grip on the concept of delivering his cargo to where it was needed—“On the motherfucking top of the motherfucking fucking hill!”—and the man responded in kind.
“Ease off there!” Frank heard himself call out. “You—take that wagon back down and make another run at it—there, where we’ve laid the gravel. And if that doesn’t work, unload it at the bottom.” He paused to give him a significant look. “No sense in killing those animals over a load of lumber.”
When he turned back round, the two men were still standing there patiently beside him, but Billy had removed his hat and held it down at his side, clutched in his good hand. “He’s equal with either hand, Mr. Wright,” Johnnie went on as if there had been no interruption, “—what they call ambi, uh, ambi—”
“Dextrous.”
“Yup, that’s right. That’s what he is. Hell, he’ll drive nails with a hammer in both hands, bang-bang-bang.”
The wagon slid back with an abrasive squeal and Ben Davis let out another skein of curses. The horses stood rigid. Very slowly, an inch at a time, the teamster eased them back until the weight of the wagon rocked the wheels free of the ruts and got them moving forward again.
“You think you can work with that arm?” Frank asked, addressing Billy for the first time.
Billy looked down at the toe of his boot and traced a pattern in the wet earth. “I can manage.”
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It took a day or two to appreciate how much an understatement that was. Billy worked as hard as any two men—every time you looked up, there he was, the plaster arm flashing in the sun, hauling lumber, juggling tools, lending a hand wherever it was needed. He tossed the sling aside the first day and by the end of the week the cast seemed as much a natural extension of his body as the arm it contained and the strong sure hand and fingers sprouting from the end of it. Every saw cut he made and every nail he drove passed muster—left-handed, no less—and he worked with such an intensity of concentration it was hard to get him to sit down for lunch or even a coffee break and when he did sit down it wasn’t for long. He’d fidget and shuffle his feet and stare off across the yard to where the frame had begun to rise above the floor joists as if he could see the whole thing complete and wouldn’t rest till it was done. And he’d climb like an acrobat, his tool belt dangling in the air, the cast hooked over one stud while he hammered home another. He was the first one there in the morning and the last to leave at night, and after a while Frank asked him if his wife didn’t miss him, and Billy, looking down at the toe of his shoe rotating in the sawdust, said, “Not much. I guess.”
By the end of the month, there were all sorts of people coming round to look at the place—Frank’s bungalow, they were calling it—and Frank tried to accommodate them all because he was going to have to live here amongst them and, of course, his reputation had preceded him. He supposed they expected him to breathe fire and speak with a cloven tongue after what the newspapers had said about him and certainly the local farmers and their wives had come to sit in judgment, but they would have reacted the same no matter who was buying up two hundred acres in their midst and putting up a house and barn and expecting to farm the place and make a living out of it. That he was one of the Lloyd Joneses, Anna’s boy, the nephew of James and Jenkin and the rest, cut him no slack. If anything, it made matters worse because they were going to hold him to a higher standard—he could see it in their eyes as he squired one hidebound old Welsh farmer after another round the place, explaining as patiently as he could the theory behind the design and painting the hills full of orchards and gardens and pastures. And what did they have to say once he’d walked them through the place and expended all the breath he could draw? “Awful big for just your mother, ain’t it?” And: “Must be costin’ a fortune.”
Snooping. Endless snooping. He was a public figure and this was a public undertaking, no matter how much he tried to keep it quiet. The workmen went home to their wives at night. They talked at the lumberyard, at the quarry, at the feed store, the grocer’s and the church. The truth was that the whole community knew what he was up to whether he liked it or not and though no one mentioned Mamah—no one would dare—the rumor of her settled over the place in a vast glutinous web spun by every busybody in the county and all of them tugging simultaneously at the threads. It was only a matter of time before the first reporter came slinking around.
He happened to be beneath the house, in the basement room where the boiler would be set in place to provide hot water and steam heat for the winter, listening to the metronomic
tap-tap-tap
of Billy Weston’s hammer just above him and giving the place a final look-over, when the moment came. Footsteps on the floor. A man’s voice insinuating itself in the interregna between the beats of the hammer. “Hello, there . . . Say,
hello
!”
tap-tap-tap
of Billy Weston’s hammer just above him and giving the place a final look-over, when the moment came. Footsteps on the floor. A man’s voice insinuating itself in the interregna between the beats of the hammer. “Hello, there . . . Say,
hello
!”
The hammer paused. “Yeah?”
“I’m just here to, well, I’m from the
Trib
. Name’s Adler. You work here, for Wright?”
Trib
. Name’s Adler. You work here, for Wright?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s a pretty elaborate place, isn’t it? Kind of a bohemian design, wouldn’t you say? What would you call this, modern architecture, is that it?”
No response. Frank could hear the hammers of the other carpenters at work, a sound as multi-voiced and steady as a driving rain. There was the smell of the earth, of the stone, of boards fresh-cut.
“Seems like Wright has big plans for the place.” A pause. “He ever mention the Cheney woman?”
No response.
“But if he did, you wouldn’t tell me, would you?”
“Can’t say as I would.”
“Well, what’s it cost, you think? So far, I mean? Must be a pretty fair piece of change.” Silence. Banging aloft. “I don’t guess I’ve ever seen so much stone for one little house—or such a mob of workmen. You’d think he was building one of those Chicago skyscrapers here, wouldn’t you?”
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