Tinderbox (8 page)

“It’s a little overwhelming to have a mother who can do so many things. It leaves
me feeling like a klutz.”

On her mother’s face was a familiar quizzical look whose melancholic undertones, depending
on Caro’s mood, provoked the wish either to get away as fast as possible or to wrap
her arms around her mother. “You were lucky,” Caro said. “All your mother could do
was clean.”

“Very lucky. All I ever saw was my mother’s backside sticking up in the air as she
crawled around on her hands and knees scouting for dirt.”

Caro smiled, imagining her shrunken, dour grandmother. “But if it were you, it would
be a perfect backside that would make mine look enormous in comparison.”

“Oh yes, my pathetic daughter. Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, director at twenty-six
of a preschool she’s since made nationally renowned.”

“Seriously, Mom, how do you do it?”

Myra closed her music books. She set them on the side of the music stand. “Once you
learn to apply yourself, to dig deep and push for excellence, you can do it with anything:
cooking, gardening, writing. It’s like learning to use a muscle—only this is a psychological
muscle.”

“How come I don’t have it?”

Her mother hesitated, as though debating if she should acknowledge that it is true
that Caro has never done anything that has required her to apply herself 100 percent.
“Everything you’ve done, you’ve been able to do with a small piece of yourself. It’s
a different experience when you have to use every fiber of your being.”

“So how did you learn?”

Her mother came to sit next to her on the couch. She picked up Caro’s hand and, sensing
no resistance, held it lightly. “Actually,” she said, “it was with you. When you were
a baby. You were a little colicky, not terribly so, and it didn’t last that long,
but I was very anxious, which you sensed, and that made you even fussier. Your father
was a resident and hardly home. On a resident’s salary, we couldn’t even consider
babysitting help. I didn’t understand then that the real problem was my own lack of
experience being mothered. I had to figure out how to soothe you, on no sleep, with
no inner model or help. That was the first time I had to dig deep. I did it again
with your brother, and then again when I wrote my thesis. Eventually, it became ingrained,
a way of being.”

Caro hands the last of the dinner plates to Eva. There is an almost ecstatic look
on Eva’s face as she glances up at the ceiling through which Myra’s playing can be
heard. “Your mother, Omar wants her to teach him. Do you think she will let me watch?”

Caro imagines her mother on the piano bench, Omar beside her looking down at the keys,
Eva on a nearby chair with her eyes fixed on them. The image leaves her with a queasy
feeling. “You’ll have to ask her.”

She gives Eva the dishwasher detergent and turns to scrubbing the sink.

24

The Searchers
begins with
TEXAS
1868 against a black background.

“It was filmed in Monument Valley,” Adam whispers to Caro. “Do you remember, we went
there once with Dad?”

“In Arizona?”

“Ford, the director, loved Monument Valley. It was totally unspoiled in the fifties,
the farthest point anywhere in the country from a railroad. He thought the landscape
looked more like Texas than Texas itself. He would set up tent cities and live out
on the desert with his actors and crew. He and John Wayne were great buddies. They’d
finish a bottle of wine together and then spend a couple of hours smoking cigars and
playing cards.”

Last summer, Adam had taken Rachida and Omar on a long-planned car trip from Detroit
to Riggins, Idaho, with the intention of showing his wife and son the land he mythologized
in the Westerns he wrote for third-world markets. The week before they left, wildfires
had broken out, ravaging hundreds of thousands of acres of land. Crushed at the idea
of canceling the trip, Adam had convinced Rachida to persevere. They arrived in Montana
to find that entire mountainsides had burned in a matter of days and flames were leaping
across Route 80. The craggy peaks of the Crazy Mountains, usually crystalline clear
in August, were hidden by sooty gray sky.

The trip culminated with a rafting sojourn on the Salmon River led by a guide Adam
had found on the Internet: a former Deadhead turned ardent Native Americanist who
met them dressed in a blue loincloth, his hand-crafted drums under one arm. On their
first day, they drifted past hills orange with flame, the fleeing elk and deer and
moose racing along the banks of the river. Late afternoon, the Deadhead guide set
up camp on a sandy beachhead. Omar raced up the dunes, whooping as he flung himself
down the mounds of white sand, while Adam squinted into the smoke at prop planes passing
overhead.

“Smoke jumpers from the McCall base,” the Deadhead told Adam. “Headed into the Nez
Percé.”

“Smoke jumpers?”

“Guys who jump into fires so they can fight them inside out.”

“Pretty heroic.”

“Yup. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them.”

“And the rest?”

“Don’t quote me. Let’s just say it might not be past a disgruntled guy to add a few
days’ work by dropping a burning briquette on the way to a jump site.”

In the middle of the night, Adam awoke to a red glow hovering over the ridge of the
opposite bank of the river and Omar’s cheeks dusted with ashes. Back in Detroit, there
was a letter from his mother with a copy of an editorial she’d clipped on the misguided
zealousness of the old Smokey Bear policy: the snuffing out of all fires had prevented
the natural clearing of the underbrush by smaller conflagrations, leaving a tinderbox
primed to set off the inferno then taking place. Across the top of the Smokey Bear
clipping, she’d printed in her precise hand
The Tragedy of Good Intentions.

Adam picks up the remote. “This shot here, wait, I’ll stop it.”

He hits the pause button, freezing an image of a woman, her back to the camera, framed
by a rough-hewn doorway, her eyes presumably locked on something she sees in the distance.

“If you’re going to butcher this by talking through the whole thing and stopping it
every five seconds, I’m going to go take a shower,” Rachida says.

Myra surveys her family. Her grandson is lying on the couch with his head in her lap,
his legs propped on Eva’s thighs. Rachida is perched on the desk chair, no longer
looking at the screen. Caro sits in the velvet wing chair with her feet up on the
piano bench. Adam, still standing, is fiddling with the remote.

In the next scene, the reverend, who is also the captain of the Texas Rangers, arrives
to round up volunteers for a band of men to retrieve some stolen cattle. The reverend
stares into the camera while the departing Ethan Edwards bends to tenderly kiss his
brother’s wife on the brow. Again, Adam stops the film. “The entire motivation for
the film is captured in this frame.”

Rachida stands. Myra exchanges glances with her daughter. Caro shrugs her shoulders.
Oblivious, it seems, to Rachida’s departure, Adam restarts the film, which, like the
mood in the room, is taking a darker and darker cast as the fear of an Indian raid
falls over the adults who have remained to tend to the homestead. Realizing what her
parents are suspecting, the older daughter, a teenager, breaks into an eye-popping
scream.

Myra looks at Omar and then at Adam to see if he wants to stop the movie, perhaps
it is too much for a six-year-old, but Adam’s gaze is fixed on the screen. The phone
rings. Before Myra can untangle herself from Omar to get it, the ringing stops.

Forty miles away, Ethan, with inhuman calm, informs the search party that they have
been duped: the cattle theft, he understands now, was a ploy to draw them away from
the homestead so the remaining settlers could be ambushed. In an excruciating display
of discipline, Ethan waters and feeds his exhausted horse before beginning the long
journey back to his brother’s family.

To Myra’s relief, Omar turns inward on the couch. With his deepening breath, he appears
to be falling asleep. Myra strokes her grandson’s dark head of hair, her fingers massaging
his scalp. She can’t shake the thought that Rachida picked up the phone knowing the
call would be for her—her angry departure over Adam’s annotations a ploy like the
cattle theft.

Eva has drawn her knees up to her chest and is chewing a finger.

As Ethan approaches the homestead, the camera cuts away from John Wayne’s face to
the valley below. A red swatch of flame defines the roof of the burning homestead,
drawing nearer and nearer with each pound of the horse’s hooves.

Eva gasps. She buries her face between her knees.

TWO

1

For as long as Adam can remember, there has been a divide in the family about the
house his father’s father, Max, commenced building the year he turned fifty-one. The
divide, Adam has come to understand, is, in fact, about Frank Lloyd Wright, whose
Wisconsin Taliesin home was its inspiration—to the ire of Adam’s grandmother, Ida,
prime minister of the hate-the-house or, more precisely, hate-Frank-Lloyd-Wright faction
of the family, his father, Larry, her secretary of state. Once Adam reached an age
when he could verbalize an opinion, he became his grandfather’s most vociferous ally
in support of the house, an attitude he only later understood he had absorbed from
his mother’s quiet admiration for the sentiments of his grandfather which the house
embodied. In Adam’s case, though, his allegiances are seen as of questionable motive.
As his father is fond of saying, Adam would have become a cannibal had Larry been
a vegetarian.

Max, who died five years ago, had made by the standards of the family a substantial
amount of money as an entertainment lawyer with a client list that Ida, dead herself
now for nearly two years, never missed an opportunity to report had included at various
times Zero Mostel, Dean Martin, and Doris Day. His own father had been a diamond merchant
in Frankfurt who came to America in the 1880s and opened a jewelry store in South
Orange, New Jersey, on whose bread-and-butter trade of gold wedding bands, silver
charm bracelets, and sensible watches he raised three sons who went on to become a
rabbi, a teacher, and, in Max’s case, a lawyer.

As a young man, Max had been dapper and dilettantish, in love with cloisonné pens
and platinum cuff links, limited-edition pocket knives, engraved leather folios. By
the time Larry was old enough to play in his father’s dressing room, there were shelves
of Italian-made shoes, drawers of silk pajamas, and a cedar closet housing baskets
of cashmere socks, piles of merino wool sweaters, a collection of fox-lined hats.

Then everything changed. The change took place almost overnight. It was the spring
of 1952, and Max had taken his family—Ida, unhappy that they were not going to Palm
Beach; Larry, an awkward and moody thirteen; and Henry, then nine—to Phoenix, where
he had business to conduct for a client. The client invited all of them to his home,
a house, it turned out, that had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was unlike
anything any of them had ever seen: low to the ground, with cement panels and periwinkle-blue
beams and ceiling-to-floor glass windows—an abode that Ida politely complimented to
the owner’s face but later declared to be the ugliest house ever built.

Standing inside, looking out at the green lawn and the palm trees and the desert sky,
Max, a man who until that moment had been an unadvertised atheist, felt for the first
time that he had seen God—seen that the duty of mankind is to honor nature and to
live in harmony with the earth and all her creatures. Simultaneously shattered and
filled with joy, he’d experienced in his bones the paradox of the infinitesimal scale
of each human being, the earth itself but a speck of dust in the universe, existing
in concert with the infinite potential of each individual.

On his arrival home, Max vowed to live the rest of his years clothed in what he already
owned. To Ida’s horror, he donated his silk pajamas and platinum cuff links and Hermès
cravats to the used-clothing store run by the local B’nai B’rith ladies (from which
she secretly reclaimed the cuff links for her sons), keeping for himself seven changes
of clothing for each season, which he wore until they were threadbare. A month later,
on a Thursday morning, he left his Riverdale home, as he did every weekday, in his
yellow Cadillac. Instead of turning south toward his office in the Flatiron building,
he drove north along the Taconic Parkway into the Catskills, where he remained alone
for three nights, purchasing before his return an eighteen-acre lot in the township
of Willow, with the intention, he informed Ida, of having Frank Lloyd Wright design
them a home.

Max commenced a correspondence with the eighty-four-year-old Wright, their exchange
of letters, which he showed Adam, mired in Max’s elegiac descriptions of the mountain
vistas and Wright’s compulsive iterations of his contractual policies. After one visit
to the bug-infested land over a particularly rainy June week during which the family
stayed at a dingy hotel with lumpy mattresses and attended a cacophonic atonal concert
at a nearby avant-garde music colony, Ida dug in her heels, refusing to discuss the
construction of anything in what she called that godforsaken corner of the world.
By the time Max was able to convince her that a nearby country home would be nice
for the boys, Wright had died and his sons were both already in college. Never having
wavered from the vision he’d had on the Arizona trip, Max hired an architect who had
spent a brief time at Wright’s Arizona studio, Taliesin West. The architect designed
a hodgepodge Prairie and Usonian house with signature Wrightian features, such as
casement windows that opened wide enough for a small person to be able to crawl in
and out, and a cruciform design centered on a flagstone fireplace.