The Women: A Novel Part 22

This must have been especially trying. Wrieto-San was the world's greatest self-promoter (with the possible exception of P.T. Barnum), and to walk down a street or step into a room without broadcasting the news was pure poison to him.

45.

One can't help wondering where Wrieto-San came up with the funds for this expedition, given that he was in debt for the rebuilding of Taliesin and Miriam's upkeep at the Southmoor Hotel, not to mention legal fees. In all of 1926, he built only two very minor commissions.

46.

Julian Carleton, 1888(?)-1914. Manservant, Barbadian, murderer. See below.

47.

Of course, Wrieto-San was the apostle of home, his revolutionary Prairie houses built round a central hearth and the rooms open to one another so as to provide an integrated familial s.p.a.ce. "A true home is the finest ideal of man," he famously p.r.o.nounced in An Autobiography (but concluded the maxim, rather schizophrenically, I'm afraid, with this: "and yet-well to gain freedom I asked for a divorce").

48.

Baron Kishichir kura, 1882-1963. Playboy, hotelier, motorcar enthusiast. As president of the Imperial Hotel and son of the head of the investment group formed to fund its construction (Baron Kishichir kura, the elder, 1837-1928), he was instrumental in awarding the commission to Wrieto-San. I met him twice, at receptions my father gave in Tokyo. He was a sleek, chillingly handsome man who favored Western dress and was interested in two subjects only, as far as I could ascertain: single-malt scotch whiskey and very fast automobiles.

49.

I can't speak for the authenticity of this usage. I have my doubts that the term was commonly employed in the 1920s, except perhaps among votaries of the game of poker-I certainly don't remember having heard or used it in conversation myself-but O'Flaherty-San a.s.sures me of its accuracy. Of course, he wasn't born until 1941. In a place called Tootler's Falls, Virginia.

50.

More likely it was some combination of grain spirits colored with caramel-or worse. It was possible to obtain la chose authentique from the French Canadian bootleggers who smuggled it across the Great Lakes or the gangsters who employed them, but that was only in theory. Most people-and I was among them-had to settle for the degraded product of amateur distillers, which was often laced with rubbing alcohol or antifreeze and occasionally resulted in blindness, paralysis and even fatalities. In my student days, I once obtained-for twelve dollars a quart-two bottles of what was reputed to be bonded Kentucky bourbon but which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a lethal combination of mola.s.ses and turpentine. If you knew where to look, however, sake was always available. Out of the stone jug, with the kanji lovingly inscribed on the round protuberance of its cool little belly.

51.

I vividly recall hearing this batrachian vocalizing myself, during my first summer at Taliesin. It is, indeed, a dismal sound, depressing in the extreme, as if the earth were vomiting up its dead.

52.

I've seen the newspaper clippings. What Miriam is overlooking here-or perhaps "suppressing" is a better way of putting it-is Wrieto-San's counterattack under the headline WRIGHT HINTS AT SANITY HEARING FOR OUSTED WIFE.

53.

House keys, that is. He never carried them, considered them a nuisance, and as for the keys to his various automobiles, the chauffeur of the moment could always be counted on to produce them when Wrieto-San felt like taking a spin.

54.

She would have seen for the first time-and, I might add, the last-the garden room and decorative pool, for instance, off of Wrieto-San's bedroom, as well as the new balcony and second-floor guestroom above the living room and the six-panel screen by Yasun.o.bu (pine, birds, cherry blossoms) he'd installed on the wall beneath it.

55.

Svetlana's education was sketchy, a consequence not only of her constant uprooting, but of her mother's artistic inclinations and Wrieto-San's antipathy for formal instruction. Iovanna's case was even worse. She was functionally illiterate when I met her in 1932 and she did not attend school until two years later, at the age of nine, when she had to be held back from the fourth grade in Spring Green because she hadn't yet learned her alphabet.

56.

Yes, and how much would that lamp be worth today?

57.

Wrieto-San's complaints over the chaos fomented by his six children with Catherine are legendary. For all his talk of the sanct.i.ty of family-and the conceit was central to his philosophy, along with a firm belief in independence of spirit, pioneer gumption and a don't-tread-on-me mentality-he seems to have been the sort of man who preferred family life in the abstract to the actuality. But then what man hasn't, at least on occasion, found himself deeply disillusioned with the distracted wife, the night alarums and the diaper pail, not to mention the expressive howls and systematic material destruction of the growing child?

58.

Judge Levi H. Bancroft, who, along with Wrieto-San's old friend Judge James Hill, was representing Wrieto-San's interests in the divorce suit. Both he and Judge Hill were eminently capable men-as capable, some would say, as Clarence Darrow, who'd defended Wrieto-San against an earlier charge of violating the Mann Act (in transporting Miriam across state lines in 1915 for allegedly immoral purposes, if s.e.xual congress between consenting adults on any side of any artificial boundary can be seen as immoral). But then, Wrieto-San always surrounded himself with the best of everything, including people.

59.

Miriam, in a fugue of litigious ecstasy, had filed an additional suit against Wrieto-San for involuntary bankruptcy and pressed for his arrest on Mann Act charges, an irony that certainly wouldn't have eluded her.

60.

I've often wondered if Wrieto-San chose this pseudonym in honor of Henry Hobhouse Richardson, one of the luminaries of the Arts and Crafts movement, whose bold primitive stonework prefigures not only Taliesin but the Imperial Hotel and the Los Angeles houses as well. Unfortunately, I was never able to ask him, because, as you might imagine, it would have been awkward in the extreme even to make casual reference to this period of Wrieto-San's life, when he was a plaything of the press, bankrupt and bereft of commissions, the "fugitive architect" fleeing the authorities in all the fullness of his white-haired glory.

61.

Wrieto-San, in his ineffably charming and charismatic way, had persuaded the owner of the cottage (a Mrs. Simpson; we don't have a given name for her) that she needed a vacation for a three-month period so that she might rent him her house, fully furnished, and rent him her housekeeper too. How he paid for this-or rather if he paid for it-remains a mystery.

62.

Another of those felicitous American expressions, deriving, I presume, from the odor of suspect fish. Of course, we j.a.panese, as an island people, have a great respect for the utility of all the creatures of the sea, and we would never dream of preparing a fish for sashimi, sushi or even stock for ramen without either seeing it caught personally or giving it a good, long and thorough sniff. And while this isn't the place for animadversions, I can't help saying that what pa.s.ses for "fresh fish" in America wouldn't serve as offal for the cats in j.a.pan-and our cats don't really eat all that well.

63.

Wrieto-San is not at his best in these photos, less master of the situation than mastered by it. He seems befuddled, as if he's just realized that he's put on some stranger's coat and hat and taken up an ersatz cane. And I mean no disrespect, but in studying these pictures, I have to say that he looks woefully ordinary, like a podgy shoe salesman wandering the aisles or the owner of a delicatessen who can't seem to remember what he's done with the sliced bologna.

64.