The Women (77 page)
165
I will refrain from comment.
166
He was, in large part, using funds advanced him by several prominent U.S. connoisseurs of Asian art, most particularly the Spaulding brothers, William S. and John T., of Boston. We can only guess at the magnitude of his commissions on sale. And his schemes for expanding his own collection.
167
We don’t know if it was, in fact, raining that day, as all the principals are now dead and I never did ask Billy Weston about it when I had the chance. But O’Flaherty-San likes the echoes here of my own experience of fetching Daisy Hartnett and Gwendolyn Greiner from that very same station on an afternoon on which I can assure you it was raining with all the merciless ferocity rural Wisconsin could summon.
168
I rely on O’Flaherty-San here. He spent some time in the islands while ricocheting round the ports of South and Central America on a merchant ship before transecting the Pacific to grace our lives in Nagoya. Jug-jug is a mixture of guinea corn, green peas and salted meat; pepper pot, as the name implies, is a spicy stew made with a variety of meats; and conkies a blend of cornmeal, raisins, coconut and sundry vegetables, served up in a banana leaf. I’m told the Barbadians—or Bajans, as they seem to call themselves—also love to eat flying fish on a bun, much in the way Americans eat hamburger.
169
To prepare the drawings for an exhibition of his work in San Francisco, projected for the fall. It was, alas, not to be.
170
Translated by Mamah Bouton Borthwick, A.M., with an introduction by Havelock Ellis. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912.
171
“Love’s Freedom” is one of the chapter headings in Key’s
Love and Marriage
, also published in the United States in 1912. The chapter that precedes it is titled “The Evolution of Love,” and it is succeeded by “Love’s Selection,” an application of Darwinian terminology to manners and mores, building toward the final chapters on free divorce and a new marriage law. One can’t help seeing Mamah’s passionate embrace of the Swedish author as a means of self-justification, if not ritual cleansing.
Love and Marriage
, also published in the United States in 1912. The chapter that precedes it is titled “The Evolution of Love,” and it is succeeded by “Love’s Selection,” an application of Darwinian terminology to manners and mores, building toward the final chapters on free divorce and a new marriage law. One can’t help seeing Mamah’s passionate embrace of the Swedish author as a means of self-justification, if not ritual cleansing.
172
Edwin Cheney was remarried in 1912, a year after his divorce, to Miss Elsie Millor. They were to have three children and a placid life, a small mercy after the conflagration into which Mamah and Wrieto-San unwittingly tossed him. He prospered in business, doted on his children and never missed a college reunion.
173
Certainly I can appreciate what the Barbadian must have been feeling, given my own experiences in the lily-white state, but O’Flaherty-San, as a
gaijin
in Japan, brings his own sentiments to the table as well. He can scarcely walk down the street without people whispering “long nose” and “butter stinker” and the like behind his back. Our own family embraces him, of course, without prejudice, in respect to his qualities. Even if he is a
gaijin
.
gaijin
in Japan, brings his own sentiments to the table as well. He can scarcely walk down the street without people whispering “long nose” and “butter stinker” and the like behind his back. Our own family embraces him, of course, without prejudice, in respect to his qualities. Even if he is a
gaijin
.
174
The telegram was duly delivered at two o’clock that afternoon at Midway Gardens, but Wrieto-San was not there to receive it. He was already on the train. With his son John. And Edwin Cheney. And with a heart pounding so violently I can hear it pounding still.
175
This gets very difficult for me. If Wrieto-San had four women in his life—four chances at happiness—I had but two. After Setsuko’s death, I thought of contacting Daisy, but I heard—through Wes—that she’d found an Englishman to marry in London, and though I never did discover how that turned out, I didn’t have the heart to pursue it. But she was taken from me, just as surely as Mamah was taken from Wrieto-San, and I, like my estimable Master, was able to find solace and love, true love, in another woman, my wife, Setsuko. We came to love and esteem each other more and more through each day, I think—at least until that French cabbie came along. With his
vin rouge.
And his pulse of doom.
vin rouge.
And his pulse of doom.
176
I don’t know if this is the time or place for it, but in keeping with precedent, I think I should identify the reference here. John is, of course, John Lloyd Wright (1892-1972), Wrieto-San’s second son, who was apprenticing during the building of Midway Gardens. Like his older brother, Lloyd, he went on to become a well-known architect in his own right, but was perhaps even more celebrated (and remunerated) for another mode of construction altogether—he was the inventor of the toys known to children worldwide as Lincoln Logs. There may be a ripe irony in here somewhere, but I’m afraid I don’t feel up to plucking it. Not now, at any rate.
177
As it turned out, the Barbadian was never brought to trial. He succumbed in his jail cell some two months later, not from the effects of the acid he’d ingurgitated, but of a hunger strike. Billy Weston told me that Carleton couldn’t have been more than a hundred-forty or -fifty pounds, and that he’d lost nearly half of that weight by the time of his death. From the moment he raised that shingling hatchet, nothing passed his lips but water. Nor did he talk. Strange man, stranger fate.
178
As I reread these pages, I can’t help imagining how different the world would be if Wrieto-San had sat down to lunch on that fatal day. He’d realized some 135 buildings to that point, a prodigious output for any architect, but the world would hardly know him as the monument he is today if he’d been buried beside his mistress in that little family cemetery in the outer reaches of nowhere. Think of what we would have lost—the Imperial Hotel, Fallingwater, the Guggenheim and all the rest of his constantly evolving and magisterial mature designs. Taliesin wouldn’t exist except as a charred ruin in somebody’s cow pasture. And I’d never have apprenticed with him or known his friendship and guidance. This book wouldn’t be. O’Flaherty-San, brilliant as he is, might never have risen above the facile gratifications of fiction. One man—Wrieto-San—and what a banner he has carried for us all. A judgment indeed.
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