T. Boyle - The Women

She found Herbert at the station, sitting huddled on a bench under the eaves of the depot. He was hugging his shoulders, the suitcase at his feet, the narrow leather tube of the flute case set atop it, gathering snow. She came up the street, trudging through the drifts, and kicked her way up the steps to him. “Herbert, what are you doing?” she demanded, impatient despite herself. “You’re not serious about this, are you?” She had a whole speech prepared about the essential contribution and integral value of each member of the Taliesin community and how much Mr. Wright depended on him and she too, she too depended on him, but the cough clawed at her throat and stole the air from her lungs.

“The station’s closed,” he said, his voice a doleful drone against the wind. “There’s nobody here, no fire in the stove, nothing. I don’t know how they expect. .” he trailed off. His eyes were liquid with emotion.

“I have come here all this way,” she said, her own voice toneless and weak, drawn down the funnel of her cough. “In the snow,” she added redundantly, waving an arm to encompass the dead street, the buried rails, the soft shifting backdrop of the storm. She was thinking of Georgei in that last winter when he broke up the coterie at Fontainebleau, of the way he’d thrown them all over with an indifferent shrug and how it had hurt her more than anything in her life. Under him they’d experienced something collectively no one of them could have experienced alone, a bond that transcended the physical and the knowable, a reason for being and waking and worshipping. Without him, they had nothing. She knew that. She felt the loss of it even now. And when she looked down at the boy shivering there on the bench, she knew she would never let go of it again. “I have come here,” she repeated, and she was coughing into her fist, the refrigerated poison of the air scouring her lungs and the brittle pellets beating at her face, “to take you back.”

There was Christmas at Taliesin that year, Frank as entranced with the season as the children, caroling and snowballing and tobogganing and even donning a false beard to impersonate Father Christmas, and then he packed up everything and everybody — including Herbert and Mrs. Taggertz and Billy Weston and his family 80—and drove them out of winter and into the perennial summer of Chandler, Arizona, where the sun blasted the splintered rock and the agave plants sent up their centennial spires. “We have no choice,” he’d told her, “if we’re going to have money to eat on,” and the promise of San Marcos in the Desert, a hotel that would dwarf the Biltmore and bring in a commission of some $75,000 and maybe more, glowed on the horizon like a mirage, just beyond the windshield of the open Packard Frank piloted out front of their little caravan. 81At first they put up in a Phoenix hotel — more dislocation, more confusion, clothes in a suitcase and Svet and Pussy looking as dazed as the parched and delirious Spaniards who first laid eyes on the place — but that experiment ended almost as quickly as it began. The expense of housing and feeding the whole troupe would have bankrupted them in a week — she told Frank that, told him again and again — and so Frank, never at a loss, hit on the idea of building a working camp on the job site. Ocatillo Camp was the result, a small miracle of timber and canvas, replete with kitchen, living areas, studio and bedrooms and the grand piano Frank insisted on installing no matter where he was. Electricity was brought in. Telephone lines. Water. Navajo rugs brightened the place and kept the dirt down. The girls browned in the sun. Herbert Mohl went back to the drafting table and Frank kept his whole team working through the day and into the night on the plans and models for the hotel and the New York City skyscraper.

They stayed through May, and then — because the heat was infernal, like an invisible wall you walked into every time you stepped out the door, and because the funding for the hotel hadn’t come through yet and because she was nagging Frank about Taliesin and the neglect it was falling into yet again — they decamped and drove back across the country to the verdant hills of Wisconsin. “Mama, it’s so green,” Pussy cried out, and it was, Taliesin, as green as life. There were the old smells, old faces, the animals and the fields and the daily reward of being alive to Frank’s creation. For his part, Frank kept working. Kept pushing. And the funding for both projects kept floating just out of reach, $19,000 added to their debt now as the cost of Ocatillo Camp, a place already vandalized, already tumbling to ruin, money run like water through their hands, but who could have guessed what was coming in October of that year? 82No one. Least of all Frank.

The commissions evaporated. The leaves blazed and fell. No one was building anything. And here came the holidays again and the cold and the compulsion to live with less, to do without, to pinch and scrape and hoard even as Frank, mercurial as always, denied himself nothing and the debts mounted. The draftsmen drifted away, all but for Herbert, who stayed on — as did Billy Weston and a handful of the workmen — for the promise of sustenance alone. Christmas was narrow, New Year’s narrower yet.

There came a day just after the New Year when Olgivanna was helping the housemaid with the wash, stringing wet clothing on a line in one of the back rooms (the girls’ things, always filthy, half a dozen of Frank’s shirts, his underwear and socks), feeling vaguely irritated because the housemaid claimed she had a touch of the flu and wasn’t feeling well if you please, ma’am, and there was so much to be done. The previous day’s thaw that took the temperatures up into the thirties had been nothing more than a tease — a high-pressure system had settled in overnight and when she woke that morning the thermometer in the courtyard had registered ten below zero. Which was part of the problem she was now having — the clothes had stiffened on the line because the fireplace wasn’t drawing properly and no matter how much wood she stacked up she got nothing but the palest feeble lick of flame. And Mrs. Dunleavy (rehired because there was no one else) was all but useless, shifting about as if her feet had been nailed to the floor, her eyes rheumy and her face the color and consistency of the ball of dough Olgivanna had set aside to rise in the kitchen.

Exasperated, her fingers stiff and the breath hanging like a shroud at the tip of her nose — she might as well have been outside for all the good the fire did her — she dropped the garment in her hands, crossed the room and bent impatiently to the fireplace. She poked at the fire a moment without effect, then snatched up the tongs and began extracting the logs, one by one, laying them on the stone apron though they were half-burnt and smoking still. “It could be the flue, ma’am,” Mrs. Dunleavy opined, even as the room filled with smoke. Olgivanna squinted up the chimney. The flue was open, as far as she could determine, but she beat at it with the poker in any case, leaning deep into the aperture and running the iron rod as far up the chimney as she could, hoping to dislodge some of the soot and resin there. She tried to keep her eyes closed, working the poker by touch, running it round and round, beating at the stone till she could feel the blackened particles sifting down into her hair and settling on the back of her neck. Then the larger chunks began to fall, and more yet, soot everywhere and the room choked with smoke.

When she was satisfied, she sent Mrs. Dunleavy to the pantry for newspaper and then she meticulously restacked the logs atop a crosshatch of kindling, and this time, when she held a match to it, the fire took. Almost immediately the smoke began to clear and both women edged closer to the fire to warm themselves. “You’re all dirt, ma’am,” Mrs. Dunleavy said, but Olgivanna didn’t hear her. She stood there, feeding the flames and warming her hands, her hair come loose from the frugal bun into which she’d twisted it that morning, her face smudged and hands blackened. They would be eating chicken for dinner that night, roasted, and chicken in a ragout for the next week, because something had got into the hen-house, a sleek killer of the night that killed for the pleasure of it, for the love of chaos, and left the corpses behind. The pipes had frozen in the main bathroom. The generator had given out and she’d sent Billy Weston to see about it, and so they’d be dining by candlelight. And what else? A tree was down across the back road and she didn’t know what they would do for eggs in the morning. But it was nothing, nothing to her, and she took it all in stride. She was in charge now, just as she’d been at Fontainebleau with Georgei, but there she was just one of Georgei’s disciples, one of his women. Here she was a wife.