T. Boyle - The Women

And for her part? She told him of the sound of the rain, of the emerald beauty of the stands of bamboo that clustered on the hillside like queues of silent people waiting for something that would never come and the strange tiny birds that visited them. Of her daily rituals, her reading and writing and the solace of the baths. Of the shaven-headed monks in the temple with its painted dragons and graceful torii and the way it made her feel as if she could touch the spirits with the pointed finger of her mind when they chanted, all in unison, and let the charred spice of their incense rise round them in empurpled clouds. She was at peace, that was what she told him, and she never mentioned the pravaz or the pharmacy or the adept maid who would lay down her life for her if she but asked. All she could want, she wrote, was for him to take her in his arms. That was all. That would make her world complete. But she wasn’t holding her breath. And she wasn’t coming back.

Two months. A gap in the calendar. Slow minutes, slower hours.

Each day was a replica of the last, but she was never bored. The everlasting tranquility of the saints came to dwell in her and she lived as if she were floating free out over the earth in some aeroplane or dirigible — or no, on her own fledged wings. Still, there was the impenetrability of the language, the harshness and abruptness of it, nothing at all like the silken play of French. And the fish, the eternal fish, their opaque eyes staring up at her out of the multiplicity of the days, their sliced flesh raw as a wound, their tails, their lips, their appendages. And the mud. And the rain. Two months. She was ready for a change.

And so when, one evening after her bath, the maid’s soft swishing footsteps stirred on the wooden planks of the anteroom, followed by a heavier tread, a man’s tread, she sat up, fully alert. And when the shoji slid back with a soft click and he stood there grinning in the doorway, she was already on her feet, already moving across the tatami to him, her arms rising of their own volition to pull him to her. “Miriam,” he said, as the maid ducked away like the shadow of a bird and she fell into his arms, her blood surging so violently she was afraid she was going to crush him. But oh, the smell of him! The touch of his lips at her throat! “Frank,” she cried. “Oh, Frank, Frank, Frank.”

They stayed on there together for five days. She showed him the trails on the hillside, the temple, the shops, pointed out the little yellow birds and the funny old man at the tobacconist’s who’d cut a perfect pie slice out of his conical hat so he could see the sky above him. Frank found a trove of prints in an out-of-the-way shop even the Tokyo dealers didn’t seem to know about, haggling over a dozen rare specimens, including at least one he immediately inaugurated into the pantheon of his favorites — it was a Shunshō, very colorful, dating from 1777, of the actor Ichikawa Danjūrō V in a red robe. When the money changed hands, he looked as if he wanted to get up and caper round the room, but she held him back because he had to save face for the dealer and his children and everyone else who came out to stare as they all but minced up the street, arm in arm.

They bathed together. Sat out in their kosode in the evening and watched the sun plunge into the hills. They ate and laughed and made the futon rock on the tatami as if it were a creaking four-poster under the weight of the newest newlyweds in the oldest inn in Wisconsin. And when they left to go back to Tokyo — together — she had a shining promise to hold out before her, rarer and more beautiful than all the prints in the world: Kitty had relented after all these years and they were going to be married.

Just as soon as possible.

Three years later, as she sat fanning herself in the shade of an avocado tree in the back garden of Leora’s little Spanish villa in Santa Monica, she was still waiting. Frank had been true to his word, she couldn’t fault him there — or yes, she could, because he’d dragged his feet through every conceivable delay and evasion till she thought she was going to die unwed like some sad deluded cast-off little strumpet in a morality play. But at least he was free now, at least he’d seen to that. The divorce had been granted back in November and all that remained was to wait out the twelve-month probationary period before Frank could remarry, and the clock was ticking down on that too — in just over two and a half months she would be Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright.

“What are you going to wear? For the wedding, I mean?” Leora tipped the ash from her cigarette against the lip of the urn Miriam had brought her from Japan and then looked away, as if they’d been discussing the length of the grass or the color of the drapes in the guesthouse. She was in her bathing costume, a blue woolen suit with a ruffled white skirt, her wet hair bound up in a towel, and she idly stretched her legs and flexed her toes to admire her pretty feet and freshly painted toenails. “You don’t still have—? ”

Miriam let out a laugh. “Lord, no. God, it’s been so long. I was just a girl then. A child.” She smiled at the memory. “No, I envision a small private ceremony, something unconventional, spiritual — midnight, maybe.”

“Midnight? Well, I guess that would be unconventional. People will think—”

“That’s just it — we don’t care what people think. And I don’t want the press there. You know what a nuisance the newspapers have been.”

Leora didn’t have anything to say to that. She set her legs back down on the wooden slats of the chaise, lifted her drink from the table. The wind — some sort of Californian sirocco, dry as dust — chased a scatter of spade-shaped avocado leaves across the patio and into the pool. She let out a sigh. “At least you don’t have to worry about the mother,” she said.

The old dragon’s face rose up briefly in Miriam’s consciousness— Don’t you dare call me by my given name: I’m Mrs. Wright to you and don’t you ever forget it —like a lump of driftwood bobbing in the murk of the Wolf River. “Yes,” she said, “and thank God for small mercies.”

Of course, now that the war had been won, she could be facetious about it, not that she’d ever disrespect the dead. But there was a time when it was no laughing matter. Taliesin had always been a trial to her, but when they came home from Japan for good 134and Frank insisted on dragging her all the way across America to play at being the country grandee, his mother was entrenched there, undisputed mistress of the house, and she wasn’t about to give an inch. From the minute they arrived, the old lady had started in, carping about her accent, her mannerisms, her dress, contradicting everything she said out of pure spite. If she said she’d like to open the windows to get a breath of air, the old dragon practically nailed them shut. Mention the menu — hadn’t anyone ever heard of a salad? — and she’d have the cook boil the lettuce. If Miriam wanted Frank to take her to Chicago or out to a restaurant or even into Spring Green to watch the dust settle in the street, the old lady suddenly developed the flu or her sciatica flared up and if her boy wasn’t there to cluck his tongue over her she’d just about curl up and die. It was as if they’d never left. It was 1916 all over again.

And Miriam wouldn’t tolerate it. She told Frank that point-blank. But this time she wasn’t going to lie up in her room like some dog he’d abused — oh, no, she’d had enough. She directed Billy Weston to bring the car around and take her into Spring Green, where she was going to put up at the hotel until Frank could give her an answer to the question she’d put to him back then—“Who’s it going to be: her or me?”—and hang the expense, because hitting him in the pocketbook was the only thing he could seem to understand. The mama’s boy. The waffler. And before she left, with the car standing in the drive and the motor running and Frank wringing his hands in the studio or out in the stable or wherever he was, she marched right into the old lady’s room to give her a piece of her mind.