T. Boyle - The Women

“Yes,” I admitted, and I couldn’t help glancing up nervously to where Wrieto-San had lingered over a table of apprentices — Herbert, Wes, Yen, Edgar Tafel — holding forth on one of his myriad subjects. His boys he called us collectively, conveniently eliding the existence of the females amongst us.

“You sound as if you’re scared of him.”

To my credit, as I recall, I didn’t attempt any of the usual bluster or bravado males usually summon in response to such a question, which at root amounted to nothing less than a challenge to one’s masculinity. I simply looked away from her eyes and told the truth. “Yes,” I said.

And to Daisy’s credit — she was a free spirit and no doubt about it — she took hold of my arm and whispered, “Well, what are we waiting for then? To Stuffy’s!”

The specifics of that night escape me after all these years, and, of course, the occasion blends memorably with so many others, but we would certainly have been convivial, quaffing beer and something stronger too, dropping coins in the jukebox, chattering, dancing, feeling as if the roof had lifted right off the place and given us the heavens just for the asking. I do, however, remember the aftermath. There was the slog back in the rain, ten or twelve of us spread out across the road that was a black vein dropped down out of a blacker sky, male hijinks, the terrorizing of the innocent cattle of the fields and an inebriate obliviousness to the dangers of vehicular traffic (of which there was none), and yet more male hijinks. We were young men. There were women to impress. Some one of us — I believe this was the night — made his mark by micturating into the radiator of Wrieto-San’s Cord Phaeton. There was, in addition, very likely to have been a degree of noise in the courtyard as we gallantly saw the women to their rooms.

The next morning, while I was bent over a section I was doing for a wing of the prospective newspaper plant, my brain swelling behind my eyes and my alimentary tract on the verge of a fatal dehiscence, one of my fellow apprentices — Herbert Mohl, he of the colorless hair and transparent eyes, looking sheepish — came to me to say that I was wanted in the living room. My eyes leapt to his. Wanted? “Yes,” he said, his voice hovering like an executioner’s. “By Mrs. Wright.”

I tried to keep my emotions in check as I made my way across the drafting room and through the loggia to the living room. Mrs. Wright didn’t summon people casually, we all knew that, and she did seem to have an almost clairvoyant hypersensitivity to what went on in the house, so that even when she wasn’t present you could feel her sending out tentacles all the same. She could be disappointed with the way I’d decorated my room or she might have noticed something I’d done while we were out in the field harvesting the potatoes or perhaps she had some complaint about my driving or my dress — it could be anything. But of course — and I will admit my blood pressure was up — the most likely occasion was what had happened the previous night. Mrs. Wright didn’t like Stuffy or his tavern. She didn’t like drinking. And she most especially didn’t like the apprentices drinking in public — and in mixed company no less.

It was still raining, the view beyond the windows obscured in cloud, the rooms damp and cold and smelling as organic as ever. For once, I took no notice of the statuary, the furniture, the bold geometry of the carpet or the way the various surfaces of the room seemed to grow out of the stacked stone pillars as if out of an infinitely branching tree. I just went on mechanically and then hesitated at the entrance to the living room long enough to clear my throat.

“Enter,” Mrs. Wright called. She was enthroned in the window seat across from the fireplace, wrapped in a shawl. Her hair had been pulled back severely so that it seemed clamped to her head. She didn’t smile. She didn’t offer me a seat. She simply waited till I was standing there before her on the edge of the carpet and then, in a low voice, observed that I had disappointed her. “Or not just me,” she went on, “but Mr. Wright and all he stands for — truth in the face of the world, the cause of organic architecture, the struggle against the tastelessness and vapidity of the International Style — not to mention letting down your colleagues, letting down Taliesin itself.”

“Is this about last night?” I ventured.

“It is.”

“Well, I — once in a while, or just this once, I felt, well, that it would be fitting to welcome some of the new people in a collegial way, let our hair down, that sort of thing—”

“Drinking.”

I held my silence and watched her eyes, dark eyes, as dark and impenetrable as the bricks of baker’s chocolate in the pantry.

“Alcohol,” she said, her lips drawn down in distaste. “Beer, whiskey, gin. And at a low place — how do you call it, a dive? — a dive like Stuffy’s Tavern. What sort of impression do you think this gives to the people who would see Taliesin destroyed? The people of the community, of the press? The gossipmongers?”

I hung my head. Murmured something nonsensical. I was so distraught at this juncture I might even have slipped into Japanese for all I knew.

“And relations between the sexes,” she went on, interlocking her fingers and dropping her hands to her lap. The cold killing light of the rinsed-out afternoon clung like a wrapper to the right side of her face. “We cannot be seen to encourage such a thing, not among the unmarried apprentices, like yourself.” She paused long enough for the dismal sound of the rain to swell up like the background music in a celluloid melodrama. “And this new girl, Daisy. Daisy cannot be compromised. We cannot be compromised. As I am quite certain you are aware. Tadashi.”

There was nothing to say, either in apology or extenuation. “Yes,” I answered.

Another pause, the rain swelling, the fire eating at the log the apprentice on house duty had laid across the andirons. She unclenched her hands and began to rub them, one against the other, as if all the source of her discontent were concentrated in the rough callus of her palms. “Have I made myself understood?”

I bowed as deeply as I could — bowed my shame, my contrition, my capitulation — and then I bowed my way out of the room, turned on one slow muffled heel and crept back to the drafting table like the penitent I was.

Later in the day, just after we quit work at five, Wrieto-San asked to have a word with me. He was in his office, dictating correspondence to his new secretary, Eugene Masselink, and he barely glanced up as I hovered in the entranceway. Had there been a door I would have knocked, but absent that option I just stood there, trying to look at ease, as he orated and Gene Masselink’s pencil flew across the page. “ ‘My Dear Mr. and Mrs. Willey,’ ” he intoned, “ ‘I suppose you are by this time anxious about your architect, more or less convinced that he has not the Willeys much in mind?’ Paragraph. ‘But he is very much on the job notwithstanding delays which are only helpful, let us hope, and with the new home for you very much in heart.’ ”

I stood there through the remainder, which proved to be a combination pep talk, sermon and bill of goods, in equal proportions, before Wrieto-San recognized me. “Tadashi, just a word,” he said, nodding toward me from where he sat at his desk. Gene — he was young, younger than I, lean and loose-jointed, with a prey bird’s beak and a stiff sheaf of hair rising up off the crown of his head like a mold of feathers — looked up in alarm, his glasses catching the light.

“Yes, Wrieto-San,” I said, bowing.

“These women,” he said. He fixed his eyes on me, his architect’s eyes, the eyes that missed no detail, that shone always, even when he was exhausted, as if lit with an internal wattage that never peaked or flagged or brooked an interruption of service. He was Frank Lloyd Wright, the greatest architect of his or any other period, and he was assaying me. Critically. I felt myself shrivel.