T. Boyle - The Women

We all looked to the fireplace. There was a fairly good blaze going, three tiers of logs stacked up and the flames licking upward from a healthy bed of coals — in fact, Wes had laid on another log not five minutes before — but of course all that mattered was the Master’s perception, not ours. Dutifully, I left my desk and bent to the fire with the poker in hand so as to settle the logs, then laid on another neatly split length. “Ah-ha!” I heard Wrieto-San call out behind me even as the Lucullan heat scorched my face and hands. “Hard pencils! You, you’re guilty, aren’t you, Herbert? And you, Marian. And, Wes — not you, Wes, tell me it isn’t true!”

He was being facetious, of course — you could hear the lilt in his voice and know he was in a capital mood — but there was a treacherous undercurrent here as well. By the time I’d swung round (I used soft pencils only, incidentally, both as a matter of preference and in homage to the Master) he’d snatched up all the hard pencils he could find, darting round the room like a leprechaun or whatever the Welsh equivalent might be, and tossed them into the heart of the blaze. Then he sprang up on a drafting stool and spread his arms wide. “I’ve just snatched victory from the jaws of defeat!” he sang (a phrase he usually reserved for the occasion of making alterations to our drawings), and we all, but for Herbert, laughed aloud.

I tell this story because it illustrates the kind of hold Wrieto-San exerted over us all whether we rebelled in an attempt to define our individual selves or not. Herbert continued to use hard pencils on the sly, just as I used soft ones — as I still do today — but the point is, every time we put pencil to paper Wrieto-San was in our thoughts. And, of course, as I’ve indicated, it wasn’t just architectural matters over which he held sway, but everything else as well, from our diets to the clothes we wore and the automobiles we drove to whom we chose to date or marry.

Perhaps I did subvert his wishes here, on this last point, but I feel to this day that I was justified — I didn’t need to be treated like a child, nor did Daisy. If we came together in love and affection and a mutuality of taste and interest and outlook, that was nobody’s business but our own. Or so I thought. Until Wrieto-San — and Mrs. Wright, who was equally culpable — disabused me of that notion.

I could see it coming, of course, from that very first day after Daisy’s arrival when both the Wrights gave me a good dressing-down, but when the boom finally fell, I was unprepared for it nonetheless. Or, no (and why, at this distant remove, must I be so ridiculously proper?) — I was stunned. Heartbroken. Scalded by the sheer audacity and treachery of it. Still, I don’t think it would have happened in quite the way it did — or perhaps at all — if they hadn’t been hyper-sensitized around that time by Svetlana’s elopement with Wes.

Of all the apprentices — and we each curried favor in his own way, even Herbert, who was the best draftsman amongst us — Wes was clearly the anointed one. If any job needed doing, Wes was there, always the first to anticipate the Master’s needs, wants and moods (and this was a real trick — we had to be vigilant at all times, so that if, for instance, we spied Wrieto-San strolling off in the direction of the vegetable garden or the stables, we had to get there ahead of him and know what it was he wanted done before he did). And when Wrieto-San called out a name for preferment, consultation, companionship, it was nearly always Wes’. It hurts me to say it, but Wes was more a son to him than his own sons, and the affection he had for Wes was as easy to read as his body language and the quick sharp snap of his eyes when Wes entered the room. It hurts me to say it because I wanted to be that son with all my heart and soul — we all did.

Svet and Wes were thrown together at the outset, almost in the way of brother and sister, and yet they were anything but. Wes was in his early twenties when he appeared at Taliesin, the first member of the Fellowship (if you exclude Herbert Mohl, who’d begun as a paid draftsman and stayed on, with no more salary than the rest of us, during the tenuous years of the Depression), and Svet was just shy of sixteen. She’d grown up with a love of the outdoors and participated fully in the Taliesin life, taking her turn in the stables or the kitchen or out in the fields like any of us. Early on, she learned to drive, both the automobiles and the tractor, and she was especially adept on horseback. She was musical, and, as I’ve said, she was pretty, more often than not dressing in blue jeans and a simple blouse, with her hair in pigtails, and managing to look as captivating as any sophisticate out of Chicago or New York. Wes fell for her, just as I fell for Daisy, and who could blame him?

I don’t know how Wrieto-San found out about it. He was so enveloped in his cloud of genius — and I wouldn’t want to call it solipsism or privilege or droit du roi —that he didn’t necessarily see the needs and emotions of others. My guess is that Mrs. Wright, constantly manipulating each of the threads of her web like a great painted spider, if you’ll forgive the image, alerted him to what was going on under his very nose. At any rate, Wes was exiled to his parents’ place in Evansville, Indiana, and Svetlana was sent to Winnetka, Illinois, to keep house for the family of the concertmaster of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in exchange for musical instruction. They continued seeing each other during this period, however, and they were married two years later, after which Wrieto-San put out overtures and they returned to Taliesin. Shortly thereafter, Wes, having come into his inheritance on the death of his father, was able to rescue Taliesin from yet another attempt at foreclosure due to habitual non-payment of mortgage, taxes and fees accruing. He proved to be a boon as a son-in-law, enabling Wrieto-San to get back on his feet financially and begin to acquire a great deal of the surrounding acreage, including the parcels on which Reider’s pig farm and Stuffy’s Tavern stood, at fire-sale prices.

But the point of all this is Daisy. Daisy and me. We stole what time we could, so eager for the touch of each other’s bodies that we engaged in the kind of reckless sexual behavior — the aforementioned trysts in the fields and at the top of Romeo and Juliet, slipping in and out of rooms and automobiles in the dark of night — that could have got us exiled as well, and of course there was always the risk of pregnancy. Which would have meant the intercession of her parents, frantic cables to my father in Tokyo, perhaps even arrest and prosecution for fornicating, miscegenating and God knew what else. Disgrace, certainly. The wrath of Wrieto-San. We had little choice but to lie low, and yet what we longed for was some time to ourselves, independent of Taliesin and the Wrights in loco parentis, and finally we got the opportunity. Wrieto-San and Mrs. Wright went off to Chicago for a week on business — this was at the height of summer, the year after Svet and Wes had left Taliesin — and Daisy and I counted off the minutes of one breathless hour, then threw a suitcase in the Bearcat and took off down the same road to the Windy City.

We could have gone to Milwaukee or Madison, I suppose, but we wanted a taste of the real thing, of jazz music, eclectic cuisine, the crush of people, and we never thought twice about it — Chicago was the only place to go. No one would recognize us there, and if we kept our displays of affection private, there was no reason to think that anyone would notice us either — or take exception to what we represented as a couple. They might think that I was a foreign exchange student (which, in a sense, I was) and Daisy the daughter of the family that had sponsored me (which, in a sense, she was) or perhaps a sister of mercy, an interpreter of Asiatic languages, a sightseeing guide with a soft spot for handsome, cultivated Japanese men.