T. Boyle - The Women

An announcement caught my eye. It was exquisitely printed on creamy dense high-fiber paper and it announced the founding of the Taliesin Fellowship under the auspices of Frank Lloyd Wright at his home and studio in Wisconsin, tuition of $675 to include room and board and an association with the Master himself. I went directly back to my room and drafted a letter of application. Five days later Wrieto-San personally wired back to say that I was accepted and that he awaited the arrival of my check.

And so here I was, at the moment of truth. At the crossroads, as it were, and could anyone blame me for being more than a little anxious? I felt like a freshman coming to campus for the first time, wondering where he was going to sleep, what he would eat, how his coevals would view him and whether he’d experience the grace of acceptance and success or sink into disgrace and failure. Unconsciously, I began to increase my speed, the wind seizing my hair, the scarf slapping at my shoulders like a wet towel ripped down the middle, and I can only think it was providence that kept the loping dogs and blundering cows and all the rest off the road and out of the way on that final stretch to Taliesin.

The river ran on and the road with it. Five minutes passed, ten. I was impatient, angry with myself, anxious and queasy all at once — and where was it, where was this architectural marvel I knew only from the pages of a book, this miracle of rare device, the solid heaven where I’d be living for the next year and quite possibly more? Where? I was cursing aloud, the engine racing, the vegetation falling back along the sides of the road as if beaten with an invisible flail, and yet I saw nothing but more of the same. Fields and more fields, stands of corn, hills rising and dipping all the long way through whatever valley I was in, barns, eternal barns — and then, suddenly, there it was. I looked up and it materialized like one of the hidden temples of The Genji Monogatari , like a trompe l’oeil, the shape you can’t see until you’ve seen it. Or no, it didn’t appear so much as it unfolded itself from the hill before me and then closed up and unfolded and closed up again.

Was I going too fast? Yes. Yes, I was. And in applying the brake I somehow neglected the clutch — and the wheel, which seemed to come to life all on its own — and my Bearcat gave an expiring yelp and skewed across the road in a tornado of dust and flying litter, where it stalled facing in the wrong direction.

No matter. There was the house itself, an enormous rambling place spread wide and low across the hill before me, struck gold under the afternoon sun, a phoenix of a house, built in 1911 and burned three years later, built again and burned again, only to rise from the ashes in all its golden glory. I couldn’t help thinking of Schelling’s trope, great architecture existing like frozen music, like music in space, because this was it exactly, and this was no mere chamber piece, but a symphony with a hundred-voice chorus, the house of Wrieto-San, his home and his refuge. To which I was invited as apprentice to the Master. All right. I slapped the dust from my jacket, worked a comb through my hair, tried above all to get a grip . Then I started up the car and drove off in search of the entrance.

It wasn’t as easy as all that. For one thing, in all this hodgepodge of roads and cart-paths I couldn’t determine which one led into the estate, and once I did find what I took to be the right road, wending through the muddy chasm of a hog farm, I was arrested by the proliferation of signs warning against trespass. These could hardly apply to me, I reasoned, and yet an innate uncertainty — shyness, if you will, or call it an inborn cultural reverence for the rules and norms of society — held me back. The automobile shivered in the mud. I jerked the gearshift to the neutral position and stared for a long moment at the nearest sign. Its meaning was quite plain — incontrovertible, in fact. NO, it read, TRESPASSING.

It was just then that I became aware of a figure observing me from behind the slats of a wooden fence on my left periphery. A farmer, as I took it, in spattered overalls and besmeared boots. He was standing ankle-deep in the ordure of the hog yard — right in the heart of it — the very animals nosing around him and giving rise to one of the rawest and most unpleasant odors I’d ever encountered. I watched him watching me for a moment — he was grinning now, something sardonic and judgmental settling into his eyes — and then I raised my voice to be heard over the engine and the guttural vocalizations of the animals. “I wonder if you might—” I began, but he cut me off with a sharp stabbing laugh. “Oh, go on ahead,” he said, “—he don’t care for nothing like that. That’s just for tourists.” He gave me a long bemused look. “You ain’t a tourist, are ya?”

I shook my head no and then, thanking him with an abbreviated bow, I found the lowest gear and started up the hill, which seemed, unfortunately, to grow ever steeper even as the limestone walls and terraces and broad-hipped roofs of the house drew closer. But there was gravel under the wheels now and the prodigious Bearcat seized it, the wheels churning and the engine screeching like a mythical beast beating its wings and belching fire. Up I went, up and up — till the gravel suddenly deepened into a kind of lithic sludge and the wheels vacillated and then grabbed with a vicious spewing of rock and I thought to apply the brake just as I crested the hill and nosed up to the bumper of the car parked there. I was lit up with excitement, trembling with the exertion, the tension, the glory of it all. So what if I’d mistakenly come up the back road, used only by the tractor and the dray horses? So what if I’d come within an ace of hurtling into the rear bumper of Wrieto-San’s Cord Phaeton, the swiftest and most majestic automobile manufactured anywhere on this earth? I was here. I was home.

My first impressions? Of peace, of beauty abounding, of an old-world graciousness and elegance of line. And there was something more too: a deep-dwelling spiritual presence that seemed to emanate from the earth itself, as if this were a holy place, a shrine where the autochthonous tribes had gathered to worship in a time before Wrieto-San’s ancestors, the Lloyd Joneses, had come over from Wales, a time before Columbus, a time when Edo was cut off from the world. I felt as if I’d entered one of the temples of Kyoto — Nanzenji, or better yet, Kinkakuji, its gold leaf harboring the light. All my anxiety dissolved. I felt calm, instantly calm.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon. The sun hung above the treetops like a charm on an invisible string. I cut the engine and all the birds in the world began to sing in unison. Almost immediately the exhaust dissipated and I became aware of the lightness and purity of the air. It was scented with clover, pine, the chlorophyll of new-mown grass and the faintest trace of woodsmoke — and food, a smell of cookery that reminded me I hadn’t eaten since that ill-fated hamburger sandwich. I took a moment to breathe in deeply, considered lighting a cigarette and then thought better of it. Taliesin awaited me.

I was just stepping out of the car, pulling off my (sweat-soaked) gloves preparatory to unknotting the scarf, when a figure emerged from one of the garage stalls in the courtyard just beyond the coruscating hood of the Cord. It took me a moment — my eyesight was far superior at a narrower range, the range of the drafting table, that is, than it was at a distance — before I realized, my pulse pounding all over again, that I was in the presence of the Master himself.

I bowed. Deeply. As deeply as I’d ever bowed to anyone in my life, even my reverend grandfather and the regent of Tokyo Imperial University.