T. Boyle: The Women

He seemed to consider this a moment. “All right,” he said finally. “Fine. But don’t expect instruction from me. I am not a pedagogue, not by any means. Remember that.” The bell rang once more. Several small birds — swallows, swifts? — darted out from under the eaves and shot across the courtyard. Wrieto-San turned to go, but caught himself. He gave me another long look. “You do cook,” he said, “don’t you?”

In fact, I didn’t cook. Or I cooked in the way any bachelor in any society cooks: minimally. The boiled egg. Beefsteak flipped twice in the pan. Frankfurter on a bun. None of this mattered, however, because my kitchen apprenticeship would consist entirely in chopping cabbage, husking corn and peeling the potatoes the other apprentices had dug out of the manure-enriched earth. The cooks, in fact, were two women of the community, the sisters of one of the workmen Wrieto-San had hired to renovate the Hillside Home School (formerly a progressive boarding school run by Wrieto-San’s spinster aunts), which stood on the far southwestern verge of the Taliesin property and was meant to house a portion of the Fellowship, and they had their own view of the Master, a view considerably less awestruck than my own. In any case, on that first evening, as I stood there watching Wrieto-San’s squared-up shoulders recede in the distance while he strode briskly away, the cane in constant motion — jumping right and left, twirling in the air like a magician’s wand — I didn’t have time to reflect on my status. At that moment an absurdly tall and powerfully built young man appeared out of nowhere, flinging himself over the near parapet like an acrobat and striding up to me with his right hand outstretched. He was dressed in overalls, work boots, a very casual flannel shirt with rolled-up sleeves. “Hiya,” he said, “you must be the new arrival.”

I attempted a bow, but the hand thrust itself at my own for the inevitable handshake, the half-amicable, half-aggressive and thoroughly unsanitary ritual greeting by which the men of this country test and judge one another. His hand enveloped mine — a rough hand, callused and work-hardened — and I tried to exert an equal pressure as we held to each other, sending my message through the flesh as he was sending his. His message was that he held no prejudices though he was nine inches taller than I and outweighed me by a good seventy-five pounds and had been raised in a place where a Japanese face was as rare as an Eskimo’s or a Bantu’s, and my message was that I was the equal of anyone and prepared for anything the Master might require of me — including kitchen duty.

“Wes Peters,” he said, giving one last crushing squeeze (which I resisted with my own not insignificant pressure), before dropping my hand by way of completing the ceremony. “And you are Sato, right?”

I bowed in acknowledgment, but this was an abbreviated bow, a bow reserved for equals. “Call me Tadashi,” I said.

“Right,” he said, “Tadashi. Glad to meet you. And welcome.”

“You’re one of the apprentices, I presume?”

“Yes,” he said, and he was grinning now. “Our ranks are growing by the day. Mr. Wright says there’ll be thirty of us eventually. A whole squad. Including women. Five of them. From Vassar.”

I didn’t know what to say to this — was thirty a large number? Or small? How much work could there be? I’d envisioned myself laboring side by side with Wrieto-San on drawings of significance, plans for great edifices like Unity Temple, the Fukuhara house or the Larkin Administration Building, my pencil under command of his. And women. I hadn’t expected women, not in an architectural enterprise. Distracted, I murmured, “Good. That sounds good.” Or perhaps I said, “Capital.”

I’d been drawing since childhood, and where my fellow students at the Yasinori Academy might have sketched biplanes or automobiles, I created a private world for myself, doing perspective drawings of invented cities and then peopling them with fully fleshed figures striding down spacious boulevards on their way to the country houses I created for them, replete with sketches, floor plans and elevations. (Floor plans held a special fascination for me because I could so easily manipulate them to the greater good and insurmountable happiness of these blithely striding people for whom I’d devise names and occupations and emotional histories, pulling a wall back here for the billiard room or a sweets room there or a boy’s bedroom with a three-tiered bunk bed, ten-gallon hats and mounted bison heads on the walls and a private chute to the street below.) It seemed I always had a pencil in my hand, doodling, sketching, shading and coloring. I’d sometimes sit for hours dreaming over a sheet of paper till I saw things there no one else could see, compass, protractor and straight edge guiding me, my knees knocking beneath the table in sheer excitement, my whole being groping for coherence. It was incantatory, a form of magic, an electric current running from brain to hand to pencil till the page came to life.

“But listen,” Wes was saying, his eyes jumping from mine to the Bearcat and back again, “I think we’re going to have to miss the tea circle today because we need groceries, I mean, we really need groceries, and I was just wondering if you wouldn’t mind. .” he trailed off. He gave the car a significant look.

It took me a moment — I can be a slow study at times, particularly when I’m fatigued, and I was no more than ten minutes out of the car, my bags still in the rumble seat, impressions washing over me like a tsunami — before I understood. “Oh, yes,” I said. “Of course.”

“If you don’t mind,” he repeated in a meliorating tone, the tone of someone who’d got what he wanted, and he was already ambling toward the car with his great scissoring strides even as I fell in beside him. “It’s only four miles.”

“Oh, no,” I said, swinging open the door on the driver’s side and peering down the hellish incline to the twisting road and the pig farm in the distance as he squeezed in beside me, “I don’t mind. No, no, not at all.”

The woman at the grocery gave me — gave us —the sort of look the farmwife had impressed on me earlier, the clamped lips and burning eyes, no hint of sympathy or even common humanity, as Wes called for catsup, coffee, tea, flour, sugar, massive sacks of dried beans and rice and all the other necessaries the farm and vegetable gardens at Taliesin were unable to provide. (This look, incidentally, was one I would become inured to in the coming months. It had something to do with my racial difference, of course, but it was leveled almost equally on Wes and Herbert Mohl and just about anyone else associated with Taliesin, and was chiefly due to Wrieto-San’s attitude toward paying on account and the reservoir of bad feeling in the immediate environs over his past flings and flirtations and what the deeply conservative local populace considered the immoral way in which he conducted himself. Publicly. Here in the heartland. And he the son and nephew of preachers.) Once Wes had put his signature to the account — the woman livid, overheated, the tendons standing out in her neck, and her eyes flaying the very skin from our bones — we climbed into the Bearcat, our arms laden, and made our way back to Taliesin.

And then I was in the kitchen, peeling onions.

The chef de cuisine (Miss Emma Larson, forty-five years old, vigorous and plump, her graying hair bobbed and swept forward in a way that might have been fashionable on a mannequin in a department store window a decade earlier) bent over a blackened cauldron that was vigorously rattling atop the woodstove while her sister Mabel beat eggs with a whisk, and what must have been several pounds of cured meat made the journey from fry pan to platter. After the onions I peeled potatoes, and after the potatoes I peeled carrots. After that I washed dishes, hundreds, thousands of them, for weeks on end. What did I learn from the experience? That Wrieto-San (or Mr. Wright, as everyone, even his enemies among the farmwives and grocers, invariably called him) liked his food plain. He liked whitefish, calf’s liver aux oignons , stewed vegetables, good honest fried potatoes and berries ripe from the bush and swimming in the cream he was denied as a boy. And I learned that Taliesin was a true and democratic communal undertaking, save for the god in his machine who presided over it all in his freewheeling and unabashedly despotic way, and I saw too that a practicing architect was like the general of an army, like the general of generals, and that a whole host of amenities, civilities and mores had to be sacrificed along the way to the concrete realization of an inchoate design.