T. Boyle - The Women

Frank needn’t bother with any of it, and that was her pride. Increasingly, in any case, he was away from home, lecturing to make ends meet. He’d been in Chicago all week, delivering a lecture at the Art Institute and doing his best to attract commissions along the way, and he was due home any minute now — she could picture the car winding up the hill and pulling into the driveway, the wheels glittering in the weak winter light, the headlamps radiant — and she told herself she should clean up, put on a fresh dress, comb out her hair, but there was the laundry still and then the bread and dinner after that and a thousand other things. As it turned out, she was so busy she never even heard the car. She was in the kitchen, seeing to the bread while Mrs. Taggertz basted the chicken and the girls played in the bedroom. Everything was still, dusk coming down, the only sounds the rhythmic swish of Mrs. Taggertz’s basting brush and the steady purr of the fire in the stove.

Then Frank was there, striding into the kitchen in his hat, coat and scarf, bringing the scent of the outdoors with him and all the fierce joy of his uncontainable energy — Frank, Frank Lloyd Wright, the genius of her life — and he stooped to brush her cheek with a kiss though there was a smudge of soot on the flange of her nose and another on her chin like the beginnings of a beard, and he was talking, already talking, bursting with the immeasurable tale of his drive up and the people at the lecture in Chicago and how he was certain, one hundred percent certain, that he had a commission for a new building there and that he’d heard from Darwin Martin and his cousin Richard and both of them were committed to the designs he’d presented them and the money would be there soon, soon, soon. His arms were laden with packages. A gift for her, gifts for the girls and for himself, a statue he couldn’t resist, for the Blue Loggia. “And this,” he said, handing it to her quickly because the girls had heard the car and here they were hurtling into the room to leap round him and sing out his name, and what was it, a newspaper? “There’s something here for you,” he said, and in the next moment he was gone, the girls spinning in his wake.

She took her time, setting the gift-wrapped box and the newspaper aside till she was finished with the task at hand — the bread had to be timed to Mrs. Taggertz’s schedule and she had to get Herbert in to set the table for eleven, or no, twelve tonight. The windows darkened. Steam rose from the pot of potatoes on the stove. She could smell the chicken browning as she shaped and braided the loaves and set the pan in the oven. Then she sat at the kitchen table to unwrap the gift he’d given her — it was a piece of jewelry, very simple, a single opal teardrop on a gold chain. She reached up to fasten it around her neck and felt the grit there from the chimney, thinking she’d have to draw a bath after dinner, and that would involve stoking the steam boiler in the cellar and yet more wood for fuel. Finally, she took up the newspaper, expecting another article about Frank, a review of one of his lectures or the announcement of an honor bestowed on him. He’d folded back the page and marked it with an asterisk. She moved the candle closer.

It wasn’t what she’d thought. What she was reading — and she had to catch her breath with the sudden shock of it — was an obituary. Maude Miriam Noel had passed away in Milwaukee two days earlier after slipping into a coma following an intestinal operation. She was sixty-one. Fifteen years ago, the article read, when she first figured on the front pages of American newspapers, she was a striking beauty with russet hair and hazel eyes — a talented sculptress cherishing honors won in the art circles of Paris. And now? Now she was dead. Her estate, consisting of her personal effects and a $7,000 judgment against her ex-husband, Frank Lloyd Wright, was bequeathed to a friend of her youth, Mrs. Leora Caruthers of Santa Monica, California. Miriam’s three children, with whom she’d fallen out, were left one dollar each. Services were to be held in Milwaukee.

For a long moment, Olgivanna stared down at the newspaper before her, smoothing it over and over again while the candle guttered and Mrs. Taggertz moved vaguely on the periphery, shifting things atop the stove. She told herself she felt nothing. Or almost nothing. Relief, she supposed, but not triumph and certainly not regret or even sympathy. A strangeness, just that, as if the world had gone away a moment and then come rushing back in all its immediacy. She was just about to rise from the chair and see to the bread — she could smell it suddenly, the hot layered scent of it expanding through the room till it overwhelmed everything, even the chicken — when all at once the lights flickered and came on again. Without thinking, she leaned forward and blew out the candle, then got up to take the loaves out of the oven.

In the second year of the Fellowship, tuition rose from $675 to $1,100—a sixty-three percent increase — and I wrote my father for additional funds and my father indulged me. By this time, I was so thoroughly committed to the Fellowship, to Taliesin and to Wrieto-San himself I couldn’t have imagined any other way of life — if my father hadn’t come through I think I would have gone out and robbed a bank in order to stay on. Truly. I do. It’s difficult to explain, but the fact of the matter is that in all eras, whether prosperous or constrained, people — especially young people, and I was young then, young and unfinished — want desperately to find their niche, believe in a vision, belong to something greater than themselves. I was no different. I lived and breathed Taliesin. The sun rose in the east and lingered overhead for no other reason than to illumine those golden walls. Winter, spring, summer, the year rushed by so precipitately it was as if the days were fanned by a breeze in one of those filmic sequences that play havoc with the calendar. Was it October again? I couldn’t believe it. None of us could.

Though I’d been slim to begin with, I wound up losing eight pounds that first year. All the flaccidity of my student days was sweated out of me, sinew and muscle tautening in its place. My fingers were nicked and scarred, my thumbnail blackened with the errant thump of the hammer. I was tanned till my skin shone like a red Indian’s and I was as familiar with the teats of a cow and the grunts and odors of the pig wallow as if I’d been born with a stalk of grass between my front teeth and hayseed in my hair. And I could drive a nail, saw a board, split wood and plaster a wall as well as any man in the glorious state of Wisconsin. All this thanks to Wrieto-San’s hands-on approach and his ongoing impecuniosity that forced him to put his apprentices to work as a means of survival. Was it slave labor, as some have claimed? Perhaps. But there was a spirit of camaraderie, of all for one and one for all, that elevated our labors into the realm of the sublime, far above the reach of the carpers and critics, with their dwindling souls and limited imaginations. We were the acolytes, Wrieto-San was the Master. We lived to serve him.

My father wrote me a six-page letter adducing his objections to Wrieto-San’s regime — which, when distilled, amounted to a single rhetorical question: What was I doing milking cows and pitch-forking hay like a peasant in a hempen kosode and shit-caked geta when I should be designing buildings back home in Japan? He concluded with a proverb: Kappa mo kawa nagare (even a kappa —a water sprite — can get carried away by the river; i.e., anyone can make a mistake). With all respect to his paternal wisdom, not to mention the check he’d enclosed, I countered with Sumeba miyako (roughly: wherever you live, you come to love it). And I did love Taliesin as I’d never loved anything in my life, though I had to concede that I would have preferred a bit more time in the drafting room and a whole lot less at hard labor.