The Women (75 page)

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Authors: T. C. Boyle

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90
Again, one wonders how Wrieto-San was able to come up with the financing to purchase materials and employ a cohort of some twenty-five masons, carpenters and laborers, many of whom had to be housed and fed on the premises. I can imagine him working his legendary charm, of course, and perhaps even trading off the sympathetic reaction to Mamah’s death as a wedge to separate friends, tradesmen and prospective clients alike from their resources, and yet
still . . .
 
91
Having left Paris two months earlier in the expatriate exodus following the first Battle of the Marne.
 
92
Throughout his career, Wrieto-San made a point of arranging meetings in his studio, where he could feel both impregnable and masterful, rather like a tortoise encapsulated in a gilded shell.
 
93
Miriam was forty-five at the time. It may be interesting to note, for contrast, that Olgivanna was then a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl living in Tiflis with her sister, Hinzenberg and Gurdjieff not yet blips on the horizon. I imagine her fast asleep at that hour—it would have been three a.m. in the Russian province of Georgia—her hair splayed out over the pillow, girlish dreams revolving in her head.
 
94
See Welsh mythology, the Taliesin chapters of
Pwyll Prince of Dyfed
, beginning with “The Cauldron of Ceridwen.” Taliesin is often translated as “shining brow,” and Wrieto-San was fond of this designation for
his
Taliesin, the house on (of) the brow of the hill.
 
95
The book was
Science and Health
. Miriam was a devotee of the author’s “curative system of metaphysics” and “spiritual healing.” Wrieto-San, as I understood him, was somewhat more pragmatic.
 
96
Miriam’s second daughter. She also had a son, Thomas, who was a traveling man of some sort and didn’t seem to have much time for his mother. Or inclination either.
 
97
Miriam, as I understand her, did tend to be self-dramatizing, though perhaps O’Flaherty-San lays it on a bit thick here.
 
98
Wrieto-San adopted the square as his symbol because he understood it to represent probity, solidity, the virtues of the foursquare, and, of course, it is testamentary to the rectilinear patterns of his early and middle work. In contradistinction, we Japanese believe the circle to be the ideal form, as it is perfectly harmonious, sans the sharp individual edges of the square. But Wrieto-San was, if anything, a rugged individualist, a one-man, as we say, like the lone cowboy of the Wild West films. Personally, I like to think that it was the Japanese influence that inspired him to employ a circular design for his final major work, the Guggenheim Museum of New York.
 
99
Why Albuquerque? No one seems to know. But Miriam’s pattern, as has been seen, was to go west rather than east, when the east, one would think, would have been a more natural destination. Perhaps—and I’m only speculating—she was imbued with a residuum of that great American pioneering spirit and a personal sense of manifest destiny.
 
100
See page 78n.
 
101
It seems a mystery how two such people could ever willingly come together again. O’Flaherty-San maintains that the adhesive was as much sexual as emotional, but we didn’t discuss the matter in any depth, because as you may imagine, certain subjects are strictly off-limits between the white-haired patriarch of an unimpeachable and time-honored clan
(buzoku)
and his grandson-in-law, even if—or perhaps particularly if—that grandson is an American.
 
102
William Cary Wright (1825-1904). Said to be one of the most charming and charismatic men of his time, who unfortunately proved to be too unreliable, too footloose and casual about earning a living to suit Wrieto-San’s mother. Anna divorced him and wrapped herself instead in the enfolding arms of her family, the Lloyd Joneses of the rich farmlands of Wisconsin’s Wyoming Valley. Wrieto-San was seventeen at the time. Shortly thereafter he changed his middle name from “Lincoln” to “Lloyd.”
 
103
I
’
m sorry, but no matter what O’Flaherty-San might say about sexual adhesion, this seems to me another of those suicidal leaps into oblivion Wrieto-San was repeatedly making. Certainly he must have known that the community—and the press—would universally condemn him for establishing a second mistress in the place of the first, as if he had learned little from the tragic consequences. Or worse: as if he cared less.
 
104
Even in old age, Anna Lloyd Jones Wright was an imposing woman, five feet eight and a half inches tall, a height to which her celebrated son could never quite rise, despite his elevated heels. It was she who decided on his profession while he was still in the cradle and she who made him her
okāsan ko.
 
105
This was the famous Steinway, which had lost its legs when hauled through a window to spare it from the 1914 conflagration. Ever resourceful, Wrieto-San had adapted drafting stools as temporary supports.
 
106
Ultimately, Miriam would be tapped in this regard, contributing several thousand dollars of her own money to the reconstruction effort, a fact to which Mr. Fake would one day be intimately attuned.
 
107
Mildly put. As I’ve indicated, Wrieto-San’s temper was a force all its own, incendiary, savage, excoriating, and all the worse for the caustic bite of his tongue.
 
108
At that time a young architect by the name of Russell Williamson. I have no record of his remuneration, but I suspect he worked for his bed and supper alone, prototype of the apprentices to come.
 
109
Then still living in Chicago prior to her husband’s retirement from the stock exchange and their move to a more equitable climate on the West Coast. Cf. page 285.
 
110
The Mann Act, passed into law just five years earlier as a means of prosecuting pimps, panders, fancy men and macquereau who transported women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution, would haunt Wrieto-San, as has been seen. Its intention was to combat the very real abuses of “white slavery,” in which young immigrant girls were approached with offers of employment (in many cases as they stepped off the boat from Ellis Island), only to find themselves opiated, locked away in a room and gang-raped, starved and brutalized till all sense of dignity and individuality was destroyed, after which they were sold into prostitution. Mrs. Breen must have been among the first to attempt to use the law as a tool of harassment and intimidation.
 
111
A strange adumbration of what lay in the future. One can only speculate as to the extent this experience may have influenced Miriam’s decision to report Olgivanna to the immigration authorities some ten years later on the same pretext.
 
112
Wrieto-San had been blessed with acute eyesight. However, according to his autobiography, he felt himself rapidly aging in the wake of the tragedy of August 1914 and acquired eyeglasses. I rarely saw him wear them, and never in public, a matter of personal vanity with him.
 
113
Despite his lifelong protestations to the contrary, I can’t imagine but that Wrieto-San for the most part welcomed publicity, as it got his name out before the public and fed his sense of self-importance. So too with Miriam. Perhaps—and this occurs to me just now—they chose each other in a flare of mutual flamboyance, each reflecting all the brighter off the other.
 
114
Surname and provenance unknown. Perhaps he was the lover to whom Miriam would refer darkly when speaking of her “tragic love,” perhaps even the very one she accosted with a drawn knife. See page 86n.
 
115
O’Flaherty-San may be thinking here of
The Wild Pampas
(Boston: Lippincott, 1915) by H. (Harriet) R. R. Fleck, one of Miriam’s favorite novelists.
 
116
We can’t know for certain, but it seems likely that he was then working on the plans for his revolutionary “American System Ready-Cut” standardized houses—what today would be called, in classic American shorthandese, pre-fab.
 
117
Public sympathy turned against her at this juncture, and Wrieto-San was able to take the high road in declining to prosecute her for misappropriation of the mails. Still, the damage to his reputation was done and he was once again seen as philandering and venal, if not faintly ridiculous.
 
118
Kosode,
that is. Lightweight summer robes. Wrieto-San collected textiles as well as prints, screens, sculpture and pottery. Anything of the Far East seemed to hold a special fascination for him, most particularly, as has been seen, the art of Japan. Do I flatter myself to say that our folk art is the equal of any nation’s?
 
119
Aisaku Hayashi had been sent by the Ōkura investment group (and the Emperor, who was providing sixty percent of the funding) to make a close study of Wrieto-San, whose reputation of working against the grain, not to mention providing regular scandals for the tabloids, bore examination before any contract for the new Imperial Hotel could be finalized.
 
120
A sign of beauty in my country. O’Flaherty-San’s wife, my granddaughter Noriko, has just such a dentition and a smile of rare and melting grace.
 
121
An unfair characterization, needless to say. My own late wife, Setsuko (née Takata), whom, sadly, O’Flaherty-San never met, was the very soul of the perfect mate, highly accomplished as a violinist, graphic designer and homemaker, graceful, intelligent, beautiful, my partner and equal in every endeavor. I shall miss her through all my days with an ache as deep and wide as the gulf that separates this life from the next.
 
122
A crude
gaijin
notion that is beneath contempt, nothing more nor less than an attempt to belittle and dehumanize our people, a process that began with Commodore Perry and continues to this day. Would Miriam have stooped so low as to promulgate it? Sadly, in the derangement of her anger, I am afraid so. Which excuses nothing. (An editor wants to strike it, but we shall let it stand for the sake of realism. And O’Flaherty-San.)
 
123
1916.
 
124
In 1905. Wrieto-San credits this trip with awakening his lifelong love for all things Japanese.
 
125
Some two thousand concrete “fingers,” as he styled them.
 
126
It was demolished in 1968.
 
127
Wrieto-San was one of the foremost collectors in the world. As has been seen, he made use of his prints as a kind of currency, playing them off against his debts. He realized some $10,000 on the sale of prints just prior to leaving for Japan at the end of this year of 1917, and he was rapidly investing these monies in acquiring a far grander and more extensive collection than anyone in the United States had heretofore seen.
 
128
Arata Endo is, of course, the illustrious Japanese architect who went on to design the Minamisawa building of Jiyu Gakuen and the Koshien Hotel, among other prominent buildings. He became Wrieto-San’s good friend and close associate and was invaluable as a liaison between Wrieto-San—who did tend to be somewhat imperious, to say the least—and the investors’ group. Without him, I doubt very much that Wrieto-San, for all his charisma, would have survived the thousand misunderstandings and cost overruns the construction ultimately entailed.
 
129
That would be Aline Barnsdall. Her residence, as any architectural buff will know, would come to be called Hollyhock House, after the flowers that grew on the hillside.
 
130
In all, they made five trips to Japan between 1917 and 1922, staying for a total of thirty-four months. Sadly, the fifth trip marked the last time Wrieto-San would ever again set foot on our soil.
 
131
Again, the ironies of Wrieto-San’s life and attachments seem strangely cosmic, almost surreal, this Olga prefiguring the Olga who would become Miriam’s bête noire some five years later.
 

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