T. Boyle - The Women

And then, just when things looked darkest, came a sea change. Miriam was charged with breaking and entering, in addition to vandalism and violating a prior restraining order. She was the one before the court now. She was the one with her photograph in the paper, the one shamed and publicly humiliated. And finally, at long last, the newspapers began to see her for what she was — an imbalanced and vindictive woman who would go to any lengths to destroy her ex-husband’s happiness — and they turned against her, just as Frank had said they would. “I’m not a dancer,” Olgivanna had told them, and that had carried weight, certainly it had, but it was the revelation that Miriam had hounded her out of the hospital with her newborn child that truly aroused public sentiment. That portrait of the young mother hustled out the door on a stretcher while her infant clung to her breast and the sleet drove down out of the sky was all but biblical — she might have been Mary hiding the Christ child from Herod, and where, in the public eye, did that leave Miriam? And then their year of probation was up and Frank married her 75and gave her the present of Taliesin, rescued, at least for the time being, from the bankers. 76“We’re going home,” he told her, “back to Taliesin. To stay.” 77

All the way across country, married now, legitimated, holding her happiness inside her like a rare and shining thing, in love with her husband and her children all over again, she could think of nothing but Taliesin. Her garden was two years dead, the livestock sold off at auction by the Bank of Wisconsin, the flowerbeds given up to weed. The house would be a mess, she knew that, damaged by the weather and neglect, perhaps even vandalized, but it was home and they would soon be there and that was all that mattered. Home. Taliesin. The house of the hill. She saw it when she closed her eyes at night, one scene after another shuffling in her head like cards in a deck, and it was there in the daytime too, solid, impregnable, while the countryside rolled by and all the towns and villages and farmhouses in the world vanished behind them in a swirl of fading specks. When the car finally turned into the drive and they came up the rise to the courtyard, she was so overcome she sprang out the door before it had rolled to a stop, running on ahead while Frank and Billy Weston fumbled with the luggage and the children shouted out, and here were the flagstones beneath her feet and there the overgrown garden and the sentinel oaks and the Chinese bell she’d longed to ring again — and she did ring it, jerking hard at the clapper to let the sound carry out over the countryside in all its annunciative fervor.

Inside, it was different, and she wasn’t prepared for it. She pushed open the door and the first thing she saw was a heap of rubble hastily swept against the wall — broken crockery, the shards of a vase, the spark of glass — and a rug rolled up in the corner and soaked through because of a leak in the wall above that was even now dripping, dripping. It was cold. Late October, the day lying soft as a glove over the hills, but in here, where no fire had been lit in a year and more, it was winter. And where was the wood for fuel? Unfelled, unchopped, unsawed, unsplit, unstacked. She wandered into the bedroom next, the girls’ voices echoing behind her—“Mama, where are you? Oh, no, look at this! Mama, Mama!”—and saw that there were no bedclothes, no blankets, no pillows even. They’d stolen everything, the neighbors, the farmers, their upstanding, decent and God-fearing countrymen who could hardly wait till Frank’s back was turned to descend on the place. Thieves, that was what they were. Thieves and hypocrites.

She drifted through the rooms in a daze, shivering, defeated, and even Frank couldn’t warm her, though he sent Billy for wood and had him light the fires in the living room and bedroom and the boiler in the cellar. Things were smashed everywhere. They’d stolen the crockery, the silverware, tools, towels, the kitchen implements, Frank’s drafting set, his bow compasses and protractors and calipers and even the collection of colored pencils he’d been building for twenty years — and what one of them, what smirking farm boy or his whiskery hog-stinking father, could have any use for those pencils except spite? Except to show what they thought of Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright and his fancy dress and his manners and his mansion on the hill? It sickened her. There was the smell of urine in the corners, as if they’d marked their territory like animals. That was what their neighbors thought of them. That was what they were worth.

She might have let it conquer her — wreckage, everything wreckage, strewn from one end of the country to the other, as if they were living under an evil spell and condemned to act out their futility over and over again — but she didn’t. There had been a revolution, the worst had been done, and it hardened her. 78And hardened Frank too. Within the month the house was transformed, essential furnishings in place, the larder stocked, fresh-split oak accumulating, a pair of milk cows lowing in the barn and new faces appearing each day. Projects were coming in — a house for Frank’s cousin to be built in Oklahoma, a massive twenty-three-story skyscraper in New York and a grand luxury hotel in the Arizona desert that would cost as much as three-quarters of a million dollars — and he needed draftsmen, architects, carpenters, clerical help. By Thanksgiving, Taliesin was alive again, all of them — even Svetlana — working so furiously there was hardly a moment for reflection.

They fell into a routine. While Frank spent his time in the studio or out amongst the men, giving orders, as exacting as the demiurge himself, all the rest was left to her, and that was a good thing, a vital thing, because it was work and work was what she’d done for Georgei and now she was doing it for Frank, for her husband. And herself. For herself too. And the children. And Taliesin, let it rise again. This was the time of seventeen-hour days. Up in the dark, to bed at nine in a numb, tumbling descent to the pillow. The smell of sawdust on the air, of linseed oil, paint. The strength coming back into her hands, her forearms, her wrists and shoulders. She scrubbed, plastered, painted, washed, kneaded, peeled and chopped. Ordered the supplies, oversaw the cook, drew up a rotating schedule of household chores for the draftsmen, prototypes of the apprentices to come, who had no choice but to pitch in lest the whole enterprise collapse around them. They might have worked in an office in Chicago or Milwaukee, might have lived with their parents or in an apartment with a whole world outside their door, might have taken their meals at a boardinghouse or cafeteria, but now they were here and it was one for all and all for one.

Winter settled in. The lake froze and Frank insisted on taking time out for a skating party. And then it snowed and they all went tobogganing. There was hot cocoa. A wienie roast. Porridge in the mornings and great cauldrons of soups and stews, heavy with cabbage, beans, rice and potatoes because meat was scarce on a farm that hadn’t been farmed, six, seven, eight loaves of bread a day, cookies, cakes, hot cider and pot after pot of coffee, so much coffee Olgivanna began to think they were floating the foundation on it. Butter, cheese, eggs, flapjacks. Apples two years in the barrel. Cane syrup. Molasses. Sugar. They needed fuel for the body. They needed heat — above all, heat. Because for all its rare beauty, Taliesin was as frigid, drafty and ice-bound as a medieval mead hall. Innocent of central heating, reliant on individual fireplaces that half the time burned down to embers, 79its rooms open one onto the other and banks of single-pane windows wrapped round the entire structure, it was practical only as a dream made concrete and why, she kept wondering, couldn’t Frank and his ancestors have settled in the tropics? Bermuda or some such place. Florida. The Gulf Coast.