Tinderbox (9 page)

Unfortunately, what was primarily needed was a proper siting of the house on the property,
which was adjacent to a pond that, in the summers, attracted wild geese whose abundant
fecal deposits drew all species of flying insects, including mosquitoes, wasps, and
bees that nested in the low eaves formed by the flat roof. Without a basement, the
flagstone floor remained damp spring, summer, and fall, with pods of black mold forming
in the corners. Winters, the subfloor would constrict and thin slivers of ice would
push through the blackened grout.

When Larry and Myra married, in 1967, Ida had already ceased her visits to the house.
Although Max maintained a stubborn allegiance to the property, which he’d named Max’s
Tali in homage to Wright’s Taliesin (a name which he pretended not to know was twisted
by his sons into Max’s Folly), he was beginning to appear worn down by the seamless
way the never-quite-completed construction had merged into ceaseless repairs of termite-ridden
beams and rusting casement hinges.

On Myra’s first night at the house, the August before she married Larry, she donned
the obligatory bug spray and joined Max on the terrace, while Larry stayed inside
watching a baseball game. It was too overcast to see the moon or the stars, the air
somehow both muggy and chilly, the only sound that of the mosquitoes sizzling as they
flew into the citronella candles. In his soon-to-be daughter-in-law, Max found an
open ear for his thoughts about Frank Lloyd Wright as a descendant of Emerson and
Thoreau and a recipient of the most elevated strains of Americanism—an Americanism
not about property and a New World Industrial Revolution but about the nation as the
embodiment of an ideal in which spirit and equality reigned supreme over tradition
and greed. It was the first time Myra had ever considered the possibility that being
an American was something to cultivate and honor. For her own perpetually exhausted
father, America had been a place to get ahead, the home of a grim, godless modernity,
an idea about which he’d had neither the energy nor the inclination to attach any
moral valence.

Until their divorce, Larry and Myra took their children every Memorial Day and Labor
Day to the Willow house—trips, Adam would later learn, that were largely bolstered
by his mother’s admiration of his grandfather’s vision, a sentiment which earned her
a permanent place in Max’s circle of deepest affection.

2

At the beginning of July, Larry calls Caro to tell her that he and Betty, his third
wife, will be spending the first two weeks of August at Max’s Folly, the name they
have all taken to calling the house now that Max is gone. Since Ida’s death, Larry
and his brother, Henry, have rented the house to two sculptors. The lease will run
out at the end of the month, and Larry and Henry intend to put the house up for sale
after Labor Day. During Larry’s trip, he will arrange for some painting and minor
repairs to be done. Would Caro like to come for a visit with Adam, Rachida, and Omar?
Not wanting to sound morbid, Caro thinks, her father refrains from saying
final visit
, though this is obviously the case.

“Actually, if you don’t mind having the workers around, you could stay until Labor
Day. I’m having the pool liner replaced next week, and the Ping-Pong table is still
set up in the dining room.”

“Did you ask Adam?”

Her father clears his throat. The tension between her brother and father has only
increased with the addition of Rachida to the family.
What kind of hypocritical bullshit is that?
Adam sputtered when her father responded to the news of his plan to marry Rachida
by asking if their children would be American or Moroccan.
All my life you lecture me on the importance of marrying a Jewish woman. Not that
you’ve seemed to think, since Mom, that it applied to you. What you really meant was
have your babies with a white Jewish woman. Only the Ashkenazi need apply.

Adam’s comments, Caro knows, had cut her father to the quick. Her father thinks of
himself as a reasonable man, an enlightened person, a man with his feet firmly planted
in science but with a healthy respect for his heritage and the history of his people.
In his mind, his feelings are utterly distinct from racial prejudice, even if he cannot
articulate exactly how when Adam accuses him of precisely this.

“Well, I was hoping you could do that. You know Adam. If I ask, he’ll say no. Think
it over, okay? I’ve got to run.”

Caro remains holding the phone, filled with the sort of uncomfortable feelings that
make her want to put something in her mouth, which, in fact, she does: the rest of
a box of cereal followed by the remaining third of a jar of peanut butter. By the
time she reaches the jar bottom, she is too sedated and filled with disgust at her
lack of self-control to think about her brother.

Adam’s response when Caro calls the following evening to convey their father’s offer
comes as a surprise. “Sure. That would be great. Omar’s camp will be over early August.
We can go for a week while Dad’s there and then stay for another week after that.
I’ll bring Eva so she can watch Omar and I can get some work done. Rachida can come
up on the weekends.”

“What do you mean
we
? I wasn’t thinking of staying after Dad leaves.”

When Adam speaks again, it is in the voice Caro has known since childhood: the boy
who, having understood that he was too old to get into bed with their mother after
a bad dream, would creep downstairs to climb in with her, the trellising details of
the dream described while she tried to make herself comfortable in half of a twin
bed. “Come on, Caro, your school’s closed in August. You know I can’t go without you.”

3

With Larry’s move to Arizona, Caro and Adam’s Memorial Day and Labor Day visits to
Max’s Tali came to a halt. Instead, each August their father would travel east and
they would take a two-week vacation with him, the destinations limited by Adam’s plane
phobia to locales reachable by car or train, with a few days first at the Willow house.
By then, with the help of abundant chemical sealants and an expert who’d succeeded
in removing the geese from the property by placing poison in the pond, Max had managed
to hold his own against nature’s attack on the property, and Ida, won over by the
presence of her grandchildren, begrudgingly agreed to summer visits. Max built a swimming
pool with a black rubber liner safe from cracks in the winter at the cost of making
the water ominously opaque and installed a Ping-Pong table in the dining room, where
they held nightly round-robin doubles tournaments, the pairings—plump Ida and clumsy
Adam, tanned Larry and bespectacled Max—amusingly reported by Caro in her nightly
calls home to her mother.

Adam can no longer recall when they ceased the August visits to Willow. It must have
been, he thinks, when his father finally threw in the towel on those summer trips,
all of which involved endless car drives during which Adam would try to mitigate the
boredom by reading in the backseat, resulting in a car sickness whose progression
could be measured in the accelerating yellow cast to his skin. Having arrived at their
destination, a mountain or lake or beach cottage somewhere, Adam would stay inside
with his nose in a book, a choice that yielded the satisfaction of substantially pissing
off his father.

It was on one of those occasions that he discovered the story of Wright’s original
Taliesin home. He’d run out of reading material before they left Willow and borrowed
a book about Wright from his grandfather’s bookcase for the trip, which that year
was to a cottage on Prince Edward Island that bordered the St. Lawrence Sound. His
father and Caro had just come in from an afternoon at an empty, duned beach, an excursion
which his father had first attempted to cajole him to join, then threatened punishment
if he did not, before reaching a final peevish “Suit yourself, your loss, not ours.”

Larry was on the back patio shaking the sand out of the towels and tote bags when
Adam, whose late pubescence had left him beached in a place neither child nor man,
swung open the screen door.

“Did you know that the original Taliesin burned to the ground?”

“No, I never heard that.” Larry sat down on the picnic bench and began working on
a recalcitrant sandal strap.

“Mamah Borthwick Cheney, Wright’s mistress”—Adam could not hide the pleasure in being
able to use this last word—“and two of her children and three other people were ax-murdered.”

“Really.”

Adam was dancing from foot to foot, approaching a state when he would get so excited
his voice would crack, his father yelling, “Jesus Christ, calm the fuck down,” and
Adam shouting, “Look at you, look at you, fuck fuck fuck…” before he stormed out—which
here would entail climbing down the red clay cliffs to the water’s edge, where, knobby-kneed
and weak-ankled, he might slip on the rocks and, Adam’s imagination jumping ahead,
flail in the crashing waves.

“Ax-murdered,” Adam repeated in a mock spooky voice.

Larry sat up, a sandal in each hand. “What are you talking about?”

“The servant from Barbados doused the dining room with gasoline, sealed off all the
doors but one, lit a match, and then stood at the remaining door axing everyone as
they came out.”

Adam sank down on his haunches and swung an imaginary ax through the damp hot air.
His father stared at him with a look of disgust, as though he were holding back from
saying something along the lines of
Don’t you think you’re a little old for this sort of stuff? At your age, I was sneaking
Playboy
magazines under my bed
.

“So, how did Frank Lloyd Wright survive this carnage?” Larry asked.

“He wasn’t there.” Although Adam had not intended for there to be an analogy drawn
to his absent father, recognizing the potential, he lingered on the last syllable
and then, without a backward glance, picked up his book and returned inside.

Since then, Adam has read different versions of the first Taliesin fire. (The house
was rebuilt and then caught fire again.) In some accounts, the culprit was, as he’d
originally read, a man from Barbados. In others, he was a recently fired servant enraged
by his dismissal; a manservant abusively treated by Wright’s lover, Mamah Cheney;
a cook driven mad by the immorality of Wright and Cheney, both of whom had left their
spouses and children to travel together to Europe, living openly together without
so much as a hint of shame.
Hussy
, Mamah would hear the cook mumbling as he diced apples for cobbler and onions for
pork stuffing. In some versions, all egresses from the Wright dining room were sealed.
In others, certain members of Wright’s studio escaped through the casement windows.
In all of them, it was the fire in the luncheon room that sent the victims into the
arms of the man with the ax.

4

They leave at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, Eva and Omar in the backseat with
the cooler Myra has filled with cold drinks and snacks, Adam in the passenger seat,
Caro behind the wheel. Rachida is on call for the weekend, her goodbyes whispered
to Adam and Omar while they were still half-asleep. Myra stands on the street watching
the last-minute loading of bags and buckling of seat belts.

For the past week, Caro has tried to convince her mother to come up the following
Saturday with Rachida, by which time her father and Betty will have left.

“Thank you, darling. It’s sweet of you to invite me, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”

“I’d tell Dad. I’m sure he’d have no problem with your staying with us.”

“It’s not him. It’s me. You know that I don’t enjoy nostalgia trips. I’ve never even
gone back to see my parents’ house in Baltimore.”

By the time they reach the thruway, Omar and Eva have both fallen asleep. Adam opens
his window and closes his eyes.

It’s five when they arrive at the Willow house. Larry comes out to the driveway in
time to see his daughter drive up with three inert bodies. “I’m glad everyone’s so
excited to be here.”

Adam opens the car door, stumbles toward the bushes, leans over the blue hydrangeas,
and throws up.

“Jesus,” Larry calls out. “Are you all right?”

Adam picks up his glasses, which have fallen onto the gravel. He wipes his mouth on
the back of his arm, points at the house, and heads inside.

Caro shakes Eva and Omar awake. When she turns around, Betty is there, barefoot in
micro white shorts that hug her broad bottom and show off her long, tanned legs. Betty
pinches her nose. “What is that foul smell?”

Caro kisses Betty on the cheek. “Adam puked in the bushes.”

Omar climbs out of the car and hugs his grandfather. Eva stands with the coolor pressed
against her middle, looking around.

“Betty, Dad—this is Eva. Eva—this is my father, Larry, and Betty. Wow, it is nasty
smelling…”

“I’ll get the hose.” Betty blows kisses at everyone, then heads to the side of the
house. Larry takes the cooler from Eva.

“It is so beautiful here,” Eva says. “I never see anything like this except in
The Sound of Music
. At the beginning, where Maria sings.”

“It’s the Catskills, not the Alps,” Larry says. “But it is pretty.”

Betty drags the hose over to the bushes and begins spraying them. The kitchen door
bangs and Adam reappears, clammy and pale. “I should do that,” he says.

“I got it, lovey. Remember, I grew up on a ranch in New Zealand. This is nothing next
to what the dogs would drag home. Chewed-up rabbits and worse.”

“Go,” Caro directs, “rest by the pool. I’ll unload the car.”

“Turn off the stove,” Betty hollers. “Swedish meatballs should be done.”

Caro and Larry carry the bags inside, the bedroom arrangements having been worked
out over the phone: Adam in the guest room with the queen bed, so there will be space
for Rachida when she comes, Eva and Omar in the bunk beds in what Grandma Ida had
called the children’s room, Caro on the couch in the den until her father and Betty
leave, when she will move into what had been her grandparents’ room.