T. Boyle - The Women

“And this consumption of alcoholic beverages.” He paused and felt for his cane without taking his gaze from me. “Alcoholism — and believe me I’ve seen my share of it in the building trades — is a deadly disease, a sickness, a vice. It destroys men, Tadashi”—he’d begun to tap the cane on the cypress floorboards, as if to underscore his point—“without regard to status or race or anything else that distinguishes one man from another. Or woman. Though the vice is of course stronger in the male.”

I began to protest. “But, Wrieto-San, you’ve known me for over a year now. You’ve seen me work. Certainly you, of all people, must know that I am no alcoholic—”

“Denial is the first sign of it. Drink has you in its hold, Tadashi, and Mrs. Wright tells me you’re leading others astray — this business last night — and we just can’t have this sort of behavior at Taliesin. It sullies us. Makes us look like imposters out here in the country where good hard exercise and plain food should be all we need to sustain us.”

“But—”

“And women, Tadashi. Marriage is a serious undertaking and I really do feel that you’re too young and immature at this juncture even to consider an attachment that carries so much — well, essence — not to mention the young woman involved, whose cultural leanings and aspirations may be quite the opposite of what you expect. What is it your people say? ‘A woman should obey her father in youth, her husband in maturity and her son in old age.’ ”

He paused to level a glance on Gene, as if to warn him off too. The cane never stopped tapping. “You are aware, aren’t you, that Miss Harnett is a student of the fine arts, invited here to study sculpture, textiles and painting in addition to absorbing the benefits of living architecture? That she is an independent spirit, hotheaded even — perhaps a bit wild — and that her father, a medical man, has agreed to pay her tuition in part because in his estimation she needed a change of scene? Am I getting through to you?”

I said nothing. My face had colored. I wanted to laugh aloud, spin my head round on my shoulders and bellow “Daisy Hartnett? But that’s crazy!” I’d just met her — I’d known of her existence just over twenty-four hours at this point — and here Wrieto-San was talking of marriage?

He was sober now, his face drawn down round the focal point of his thinly pursed lips. “Sexual matters,” he said. “Intimacy. The sort of thing that belongs properly only to matrimony — this is why she’s here, Tadashi, this is her burden. And we won’t make it heavier for her.”

“I just — Wrieto-San, with all respect, I’ve just met her. And I don’t mean anything, I didn’t know, I just — what about collegiality? One for all and—”

“Tadashi, and I’m very sorry to say this, to have to say this”—he turned away from me, snatched up a draft of the letter and made as if to examine it—“but you’re fired. You’ll have to pack up and go.” And then, softening the blow: “I’m afraid that’s all there is to it.”

There are times in life when you feel as empty as a reed, your inner self obliterated in a thunderclap, all you’ve gained and loved and hoped for gone in a single stroke. I felt it in December of 1941 when the reports came through the radio that Pearl Harbor had been attacked and again in the 1950s when I was living in Paris and a wheezing man in mustache and cap climbed three flights of stairs to hand me the wire notifying me of my father’s death. And I felt it then, felt it as a single savage deracination of the hara, as when Tojo’s militarists turned their swords on themselves in defeat. Fired? Cast out of Taliesin? I’d seen others leave in disgrace for one infraction or another and I couldn’t imagine it for myself. Not yet. Not now.

I bowed. Bowed so deeply I might have touched the floor. And then I heard my own voice emerging in a choked whisper: “Wrieto-San, I accept your judgment as one unworthy of the high ideals of Taliesin.” I paused, my breathing damp and tumultuous. “But before I go, may I ask you one thing about the design for the Robie house? I’ve always, and my countrymen too, we’ve always admired this design as the pinnacle of your Prairie architecture, and I was just wondering how you came up with the solution of situating it to the road on such a narrow lot?”

I remember Wrieto-San setting down the letter and twisting round in his seat to stare at me. It took him a moment, shifting gears, calibrating, a slow flush of anticipatory pleasure infusing his features. “Well, you see,” he began, entirely forgetting himself, “as you point out there was the problem of the site to begin with, a relationship to the street, you understand, and the existing structures on the block,” and he talked straight through, hardly drawing a breath, till the dinner bell rang. The rain had let up. It was dark beyond the windows. He stood slowly and stretched himself, as if he were just waking from a nap, looked to Gene, who’d risen too, and then to me, seeing me — really seeing me — for the first time in the course of the hour. “Well, Sato-San,” he said at last, “no harm done really, I suppose. You’ll stay on, then. But no more of this”—he waved his hand as if to signify everything, every possible behavior, every error and slipup and falling away from the path of organic architecture—“this, this. . anyway, your work has been satisfactory. And if I’m not mistaken, the dinner bell has rung.”

I should point out that in the course of my tenure at Taliesin, I was called on the carpet half a dozen times and thrice fired, each time managing to distract Wrieto-San long enough for his umbrage to dissipate — the fact was that he loved to talk, loved to reminisce, make pronouncements, level judgments and animadversions, never happier than when delivering a sermon on any subject that came to mind, all the while striding back and forth across the floor, twirling his cane and gesticulating, and we apprentices learned to take advantage of it. And I should say too, as will be apparent to attentive readers of the text above, that Daisy and I carried on an exhaustive love affair under the noses of both the Wrights, finding access to various rooms late at night, making use of the fields as the weather warmed, and even, on one memorable occasion, the celebrated windmill tower he’d built as a young man for his aunts and named (appropriately enough for our purposes, as it turned out) Romeo and Juliet. And that the very evening he’d warned me off, not ten minutes after I left him, I walked into the dining room and felt my blood sing in a key that knew no restraint or regulation when I saw Daisy sitting there amongst the others like an empress among the commoners. I meant no disrespect to the Master or to Mrs. Wright either, but I believed then and believe now that no one has the right to proscribe relations between young people who feel a strong mutual attraction. Lovers, that is. We were lovers, Daisy and I, and through all these years I’ve never gone through a single day without thinking of her.

At any rate, it was at about this time that I had an opportunity to prove my worth to Wrieto-San in a more direct way than plying T-square and triangle (or pledging allegiance to some absurd monastic regime, for that matter). It was a brisk day toward the end of October, the sun casting a pale cold eye over the fields, the season in decline, the trees lifeless, even the shadows bleached out and enervated. I was in the orchard picking apples with a crew of apprentices when Wrieto-San came striding over the rise in his jodhpurs and long trailing coat. As he drew closer, we could see that he was wearing a new tweed jacket and the high stiff collar and artiste’s tie he favored on formal occasions. Herbert, who was standing on the seat of the tractor and using a rake to dislodge the fruit from the upper branches, paused a moment. “Looks like he’s getting ready to drive into town,” he observed in his hollow fractured tones. “Wonder which of us is going to be the lucky man?”