T. Boyle - The Women

And yet here I was, fighting the gearshift and the clutch that was so stiff it all but dislocated my kneecap every time I disengaged it, weaving down a godforsaken unpaved lane in the hinterlands of Wisconsin, immured in an ever-deepening layer of dust and insect parts, frustrated, angry, lost. But not simply lost: irretrievably lost. I’d seen the same farmhouse three times now and counting, the same staved-in wagon with the weeds growing through the spokes of its rusted wheels, the same wedge-faced cows in the same field, gazing at me out of the maddening nullity of their bovine eyes, and I didn’t know what to do. Somehow I’d fallen into the trance of the roadway, my limbs working automatically, my brain shut down, and all I could do was turn left and then right and left again till the familiar barn loomed up in front of me and I found myself creeping past it yet again in my growling sleek road machine that had become my purgatory and my prison.

As it happened, I was in possession of a hand-drawn map sent me by one Karl Jensen, secretary for the Taliesin Fellowship, of which I was a new — and charter — member, but it showed a purported road along a purported river that didn’t seem to exist. I was wondering where I’d gone wrong, the persistent whine of the engine sending up sympathetic vibrations in my head, when on what must have been my fourth pass, the scene suddenly shifted: there was the barn, there the wagon, there the cows, but now something new had entered the picture. A stout woman in a plain gray shift and apron was stationed at the side of the road, a brindled dog and two small boys at her side. When I came within sight she began windmilling her arms as if we were at sea and she’d fallen over the rail and into the green grip of the tailing waves, and before I could think I was jerking at the gearshift and riding the brake until the car came to a lurching halt some twenty feet beyond her. She waited a moment till the dust had cleared, then came up the side of the road wearing a stoic expression, the boys (they must have been seven or eight, somewhere in that range) dancing on ahead of her while the dog yapped at their heels.

“Hello!” she called out in a breathless delicate voice. “Hello!”

She was at the side of the car now, the boys shying away at the last minute to poise waist-deep in the roadside vegetation and peer up uncertainly at me. I was conscious of the distance between us, of the high-flown seat of my Stutz automobile and the prodigious running slope of its fenders. The weeds, flecked here and there with the rust of the season, crowded the roadway, which wasn’t much wider than a cart-path in any case. One of the boys reached down for a stem of grass and inserted it between his front teeth. I couldn’t think of what to say.

I watched her expression as she took me in, two pale Hibernian eyes measuring my face, my clothes, the splendor of the automobile. “Are you looking for something?” she asked, but plunged right on without waiting for the answer. “Because you been up this road four times now. Are you lost”—and here she registered the truth of what her eyes had been telling her all along: that is, that I was foreign, and worse, an exotic—“or something? ”

“Yes,” I said, trying for a smile. “I seem to have — got myself in a bind here. I’m looking for Taliesin?” I made a question of it, though I didn’t realize at the time that I was mispronouncing the name, since I’d never heard it spoken aloud. I suppose I must have given it a Japanese emphasis— Tál-yay-seen rather than the more mellifluous Tal-ee-éssin , because she just stared blankly at me. I repeated myself twice more before one of the boys spoke up: “I think he means Taliesin, Ma.”

“Taliesin?” she repeated, and her features contracted round the sourness of the proper noun. “Why would you want to go there for? ” she asked, her voice rising to a kind of suppressed yelp on the final (superfluous) syllable, but even as she asked, the answer was settling into her eyes. Whatever the association was, it wasn’t pleasant.

“I have a, uh”—the car shuddered and belched beneath me—“an appointment.”

“Who with?”

The words were out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying: “Wrieto-San.”

The narrowed eyes, the mouth gone rancid all over again, the dog panting, the boys gaping, insects everywhere: “Who?”

“Mr. Lloyd Wright,” I said. “The architect. Builder of”—I’d pored over the Wasmuth portfolio till the pages were frayed and I knew every one of his houses by heart, but all I could think of in the extremity was the pride of Tokyo—“the Imperial Hotel.”

No impression, nothing. I began to feel irritated. My English was perfectly intelligible — and I had sufficient command of it even to pronounce with little effort that knelling consonant that gave my countrymen so much trouble on the palate. “Mr. Lloyd Wright,” I repeated, giving careful emphasis to the double L .

And now it was my turn for a moment of extended observation: Who was this woman? This farmwife with the unkempt boys and outsized bosom and the chins encapsulating one another like the rings of a tree? Who was she to question me? I didn’t know, not at the time, but I suspected she’d never heard of the Imperial Hotel or the unearthly beauty of its design and the revolutionary engineering that enabled it to survive the worst seismic catastrophe in our history with nothing more than cosmetic repairs — for that matter, I suspected she’d never heard of my country either, or of the vast seething cauldron of the Pacific Ocean that lay between there and here. But she knew the name of Lloyd Wright. It exploded like an artillery shell in the depths of her eyes, drew her mouth down till it was closed up like a lockbox.

“I can’t help you,” she said, lifting one hand and dropping it again, and then she turned away and started back down the road. For a moment the boys lingered, awed by the miraculous vision of this gleaming sporty first-rate yellow-and-black automobile drawn up there on the verge of their country lane and the exotic in command of it, but then they slouched their shoulders and drifted along in her wake. I was left with the insects, the weeds and the dog, which squatted briefly in the dirt to dig at a flea behind one ear before trotting off after them.

As it turned out, I did ultimately find the road to Taliesin, whatever the symbolism of that might imply or portend — if I hadn’t, there wouldn’t be much point in putting any of this down on paper. At any rate, I sat there a moment, dumbfounded by the kind of show of indifference that might have been usual here but would have been unheard of in my country— Americans, I muttered, and I couldn’t help thinking of my father, an inveterate rumbler and declaimer whose mounting frustrations during his Washington years seemed almost to have buried him — then jerked my hand to the gearshift and reversed direction. The farmhouse passed by on my left this time and before long I was taking a series of random turns until I found myself discovering new barns, new lanes and new ruts until finally — mirabile dictu — the purported river came into existence and the road along with it. I felt my spirits soar. Things were looking up.

Any minute now, I kept telling myself, any minute, but then, in the midst of my mounting joy, my insecurities began to take hold. I had no idea what to expect. While I was confident in my education to this point — after a full course of study at Tokyo Imperial University, I came first to Harvard and then M.I.T. for advanced work because I wanted a modern outlook on architecture, a Western outlook, and I was willing to work all day and lucubrate till dawn to get it — I was coming to Taliesin on impulse. It was as simple as this: one afternoon the previous spring I’d been trudging down the hall of the architecture building with a ziggurat of books under one arm and my case of drafting tools in the other, feeling out of sorts and depressed (what the popular musicians call “blue,” the true hue of anomie and hopelessness, my inamorata having left me for a Caucasian who played trombone, that most phallic of instruments, my studies repetitive and insipid and as antiquated as the Ionic column and plinth on which they were founded) when I took a bleary, world-weary moment to stand before the notice board outside the dean’s office.