The Women: A Novel Part 8

Stuffy's, as I informed her, was a tavern built, owned and operated by one of the local dairymen, Stuffy Vale, who had sold his cheese factory in the face of compet.i.tion from Carnation and other large-scale concerns and used the proceeds to erect a drinking establishment, much to the consternation of Wrieto-San and the delight of the apprentices. It was located on "our" side of the Wisconsin River, halfway to the town of Helena. That is, an easy walk. Even in the rain.

"You'll see," I said. "It's not far."

"We're walking?"

"Yes," I said, lowering my voice still further as Mrs. Wright and her daughters pa.s.sed out of the room. "Because, well, you see if we start up one of the cars at this hour, Wrieto-San will be sure to hear it-"

"And he would disapprove." She was watching me closely, her lips drawn back in an expectant smile. She was wearing a floral skirt and a white cardigan that gripped her in just the right places. Her hair, released from the prison of the hat, was combed out in a rolling tide of crimped curls after the style of the actress who'd humbled the ape in that year's big Hollywood extravaganza.

"Yes," I admitted, and I couldn't help glancing up nervously to where Wrieto-San had lingered over a table of apprentices-Herbert, Wes, Yen, Edgar Tafel-holding forth on one of his myriad subjects. His boys he called us collectively, conveniently eliding the existence of the females amongst us.

"You sound as if you're scared of him."

To my credit, as I recall, I didn't attempt any of the usual bl.u.s.ter or bravado males usually summon in response to such a question, which at root amounted to nothing less than a challenge to one's masculinity. I simply looked away from her eyes and told the truth. "Yes," I said.

And to Daisy's credit-she was a free spirit and no doubt about it-she took hold of my arm and whispered, "Well, what are we waiting for then? To Stuffy's!"

The specifics of that night escape me after all these years, and, of course, the occasion blends memorably with so many others, but we would certainly have been convivial, quaffing beer and something stronger too, dropping coins in the jukebox, chattering, dancing, feeling as if the roof had lifted right off the place and given us the heavens just for the asking. I do, however, remember the aftermath. There was the slog back in the rain, ten or twelve of us spread out across the road that was a black vein dropped down out of a blacker sky, male hijinks, the terrorizing of the innocent cattle of the fields and an inebriate obliviousness to the dangers of vehicular traffic (of which there was none), and yet more male hijinks. We were young men. There were women to impress. Some one of us-I believe this was the night-made his mark by micturating into the radiator of Wrieto-San's Cord Phaeton. There was, in addition, very likely to have been a degree of noise in the courtyard as we gallantly saw the women to their rooms.

The next morning, while I was bent over a section I was doing for a wing of the prospective newspaper plant, my brain swelling behind my eyes and my alimentary tract on the verge of a fatal dehiscence, one of my fellow apprentices-Herbert Mohl, he of the colorless hair and transparent eyes, looking sheepish-came to me to say that I was wanted in the living room. My eyes leapt to his. Wanted? "Yes," he said, his voice hovering like an executioner's. "By Mrs. Wright."

I tried to keep my emotions in check as I made my way across the drafting room and through the loggia to the living room. Mrs. Wright didn't summon people casually, we all knew that, and she did seem to have an almost clairvoyant hypersensitivity to what went on in the house, so that even when she wasn't present you could feel her sending out tentacles all the same. She could be disappointed with the way I'd decorated my room or she might have noticed something I'd done while we were out in the field harvesting the potatoes or perhaps she had some complaint about my driving or my dress-it could be anything. But of course-and I will admit my blood pressure was up-the most likely occasion was what had happened the previous night. Mrs. Wright didn't like Stuffy or his tavern. She didn't like drinking. And she most especially didn't like the apprentices drinking in public-and in mixed company no less.

It was still raining, the view beyond the windows obscured in cloud, the rooms damp and cold and smelling as organic as ever. For once, I took no notice of the statuary, the furniture, the bold geometry of the carpet or the way the various surfaces of the room seemed to grow out of the stacked stone pillars as if out of an infinitely branching tree. I just went on mechanically and then hesitated at the entrance to the living room long enough to clear my throat.

"Enter," Mrs. Wright called. She was enthroned in the window seat across from the fireplace, wrapped in a shawl. Her hair had been pulled back severely so that it seemed clamped to her head. She didn't smile. She didn't offer me a seat. She simply waited till I was standing there before her on the edge of the carpet and then, in a low voice, observed that I had disappointed her. "Or not just me," she went on, "but Mr. Wright and all he stands for-truth in the face of the world, the cause of organic architecture, the struggle against the tastelessness and vapidity of the International Style-not to mention letting down your colleagues, letting down Taliesin itself."

"Is this about last night?" I ventured.

"It is."

"Well, I-once in a while, or just this once, I felt, well, that it would be fitting to welcome some of the new people in a collegial way, let our hair down, that sort of thing-"

"Drinking."

I held my silence and watched her eyes, dark eyes, as dark and impenetrable as the bricks of baker's chocolate in the pantry.

"Alcohol," she said, her lips drawn down in distaste. "Beer, whiskey, gin. And at a low place-how do you call it, a dive?-a dive like Stuffy's Tavern. What sort of impression do you think this gives to the people who would see Taliesin destroyed? The people of the community, of the press? The gossipmongers?"

I hung my head. Murmured something nonsensical. I was so distraught at this juncture I might even have slipped into j.a.panese for all I knew.

"And relations between the s.e.xes," she went on, interlocking her fingers and dropping her hands to her lap. The cold killing light of the rinsed-out afternoon clung like a wrapper to the right side of her face. "We cannot be seen to encourage such a thing, not among the unmarried apprentices, like yourself." She paused long enough for the dismal sound of the rain to swell up like the background music in a celluloid melodrama. "And this new girl, Daisy. Daisy cannot be compromised. We cannot be compromised. As I am quite certain you are aware. Tadashi."

There was nothing to say, either in apology or extenuation. "Yes," I answered.

Another pause, the rain swelling, the fire eating at the log the apprentice on house duty had laid across the andirons. She unclenched her hands and began to rub them, one against the other, as if all the source of her discontent were concentrated in the rough callus of her palms. "Have I made myself understood?"

I bowed as deeply as I could-bowed my shame, my contrition, my capitulation-and then I bowed my way out of the room, turned on one slow m.u.f.fled heel and crept back to the drafting table like the penitent I was.

Later in the day, just after we quit work at five, Wrieto-San asked to have a word with me. He was in his office, dictating correspondence to his new secretary, Eugene Ma.s.selink, and he barely glanced up as I hovered in the entranceway. Had there been a door I would have knocked, but absent that option I just stood there, trying to look at ease, as he orated and Gene Ma.s.selink's pencil flew across the page. " 'My Dear Mr. and Mrs. Willey,' " he intoned, " 'I suppose you are by this time anxious about your architect, more or less convinced that he has not the Willeys much in mind?' Paragraph. 'But he is very much on the job notwithstanding delays which are only helpful, let us hope, and with the new home for you very much in heart.' "

I stood there through the remainder, which proved to be a combination pep talk, sermon and bill of goods, in equal proportions, before Wrieto-San recognized me. "Tadashi, just a word," he said, nodding toward me from where he sat at his desk. Gene-he was young, younger than I, lean and loose-jointed, with a prey bird's beak and a stiff sheaf of hair rising up off the crown of his head like a mold of feathers-looked up in alarm, his gla.s.ses catching the light.

"Yes, Wrieto-San," I said, bowing.

"These women," he said. He fixed his eyes on me, his architect's eyes, the eyes that missed no detail, that shone always, even when he was exhausted, as if lit with an internal wattage that never peaked or flagged or brooked an interruption of service. He was Frank Lloyd Wright, the greatest architect of his or any other period, and he was a.s.saying me. Critically. I felt myself shrivel.

"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. "s.e.xual 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, s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 antic.i.p.atory 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 p.r.o.nouncements, 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?"

Wrieto-San tried not to show favoritism, selecting one or the other of us at whim to accompany him to a potential job site, run an errand or simply pick up a hoe and listen to him expatiate on whatever subject he was revolving at the time. On this particular day, he strode right up to our little group-Esther and Gwendolyn were working with us, as I recall-and sang out, "Tadashi, how about joining me in a little excursion to Madison. To pick up those tools for the Hillside project, I mean, and a few other little necessaries?"

He drove with the top down, though, as I say, the day was brisk and made brisker by the winds generated by the Cord as he accelerated at will past farm vehicles, looming trucks and the creeping shapes of less powerful automobiles. He kept up a discourse the whole way, talking of his lectures and the money and recognition they were bringing Taliesin and how within the coming months we were sure to have a plethora of commissions piling up, enough to keep us all busy in the drafting room six days a week. I wrapped a m.u.f.fler round my throat, patted at my flying hair and listened. As we came into the outskirts of the city, I couldn't help feeling a sudden swell of pride-Wrieto-San had selected me as his companion and all the world could see it. There I was, seated at his right hand, trying to look worthy and oblivious at the same time, and failing, I'm afraid, to suppress a smile of the purest bliss. The superlative automobile growled as he shifted gears, the hood shimmering under a fresh coat of apprentice-applied wax, the wheels chopping at the light, and we glided through those depleted streets with their spindly Fords and down-at-the-mouth Chevrolets in an aura of grace and privilege. Everywhere we went, heads turned.

We stopped to eat at the sort of establishment Wrieto-San preferred-a drugstore lunch counter given to excesses of gravy, chopped meat and great mounds of potatoes and succotash-and then went into the hardware store, the Cord stationed at the curb out front and attracting an army of small boys and gaping men in overalls and winnowed hats. Wrieto-San focused all his charm on the man at the counter, paid something on account-he was in arrears for several hundred dollars-and we collected the tools and made our way out the door, Wrieto-San strutting ahead of me while I brought up the rear, burdened with packages.

Just as I stepped out onto the sidewalk, one elbow bracing the door as I stood aside for a stout farmwife in a patched cloth coat who managed to look fleetingly familiar, I was seized from behind. Two arms looped round me, tight as cables, and I was drawn back into a kind of shuffling dance as I lost my grip on the packages and a pair of crowbars and a shingling hatchet rang on the pavement at my feet and wood screws exploded from a brown paper bag. I fought back, twisting my head to get a glimpse of my antagonist, but he'd burrowed his forehead into the crook of my neck for leverage and all I knew of him was his furious reeking breath that came in hard bursts and grunts of labor. "Let go of me!" I shouted, and people were stopping on the street to gaze up in alarm. "Are you mad? Let go!" I jerked furiously. He held tight. We danced across the sidewalk, rebounding from the display window of the hardware store not once but twice, the gla.s.s shuddering with the impact. I didn't know what was happening. I fought to work my right arm free and rake at my attacker's throat.

And then I saw Wrieto-San and understood. He'd been arrested at the door of the Cord by a farmer in overalls and a sweater torn at the elbows. All the blood was in the farmer's face. His eyes were squeezed almost shut and there was a single deep trench of animosity dug between them. "You son of a b.i.t.c.h," he said, and he wasn't shouting, wasn't making it a curse or an accusation, merely a statement of fact. "You think you can cheat my wife out of her wages and then ride around in your fancy machine like some sort of king? You think you're so high and mighty?"

Wrieto-San was puffed up like a rooster, the cane raised in a defensive posture. He backed up against the car, shouting "Stay away from me! Stay away!"

But the farmer wouldn't stay away and he had no more words. He took a step back to brace himself and then suddenly lashed out, the oversized wedge of his fist jumping out of the sleeve of his sweater to make audible contact with the bone and cartilage of Wrieto-San's unresisting nose. It was a shattering blow. Wrieto-San-he was in his mid-sixties, remember-floundered, sliding across the polished fender of the Cord like a seal slipping into an incarnadine sea, the cane clattering to the pavement, his hat glancing away all on its own and only his overcoat to break his fall.

"Wrieto-San!" I cried out-bellowed, bleated-and everyone froze in place for the smallest fraction of an instant. And then the arms broke their grip and I whirled round on my attacker-the same slab of a b.u.t.ter-stinking Irish face as the farmer himself, the same eyes, only wider and younger-and there was a swift exchange of meaningless blows even as Wrieto-San, as he described in his account of the incident in the revised edition of An Autobiography, sprang up off the pavement and locked arms with his adversary (only to be flattened again), the two rolling off the curb and into the mud and refuse of the gutter. For a moment, Wrieto-San was on top, the unremitting flow from his mashed-in nose washing over his a.s.sailant in such volume and with such force I thought he was bleeding to death, but then the two were tangled again and the farmer was on top, his fist rising and falling in swift violent thrusts. "Take him off!" Wrieto-San was crying. "Take the man off me, for Christ's sake! He's killing me!"

I grabbed the farmer by the shoulder and there were others there now too, a big-bottomed shopkeeper in shirtsleeves and galluses wading into the fray while a man in some sort of regimental regalia commanded, "Get out of that now!" in a voice of iron. The farmer whirled round-his neck inflamed, his face the size and color of a prize ham-gave me a violent shove and darted off into the crowd that had materialized out of nowhere.

Several of us helped Wrieto-San to his feet, where he stood woozily against the fender of the Cord, his hair disarranged, one cheek sc.r.a.ped and muddy, a dripping red handkerchief pressed to his nose. "Get that man," he ordered in an unsteady voice. "I want him arrested. Do you see what he did to me? " He let his gaze wander over the crowd of storekeepers, farmwives, urchins. "Lawlessness is what it is. Lawlessness right here in the streets of Madison."

No one moved. The farmer had vanished, along with his son and wife (Mrs. Dunleavy, if you haven't guessed). It was up to me to help Wrieto-San into the pa.s.senger's seat and tame the violent mechanism of the Cord long enough to get us to the nearest medical facility, where I waited while a stooped old country doctor set and bandaged his nose in a spidery arrangement of gauze and antiseptic tape. And it was up to me to drive us home to Taliesin in the chill of the declining day, with the wind up and Wrieto-San in pugilistic mode. I don't recall if Boris Karloff had made his dramatic appearance in The Mummy by then, but this was what Wrieto-San looked like, his face lost to its bandages, the cane poking at the darkening sky, his voice rising in wrath and fulmination all the long way home.

As it developed, that wasn't the end of it.

We'd no sooner come up the drive and rolled into the courtyard than a handful of apprentices, curious over our late arrival and eager for any sort of diversion from the routine, streamed out of the studio at the sound of the Cord's mighty engine in its dying fall. Wes was in the vanguard. "My G.o.d," he boomed, bursting through the outer door. "What happened? Was it an accident?" In the next moment everyone had crowded round, goggling at Wrieto-San's bandages and taking in the spectacle of me sitting behind the wheel in the privileged position, my color high and a shining stippled contusion painting my right cheekbone.

"Mr. Wright, are you okay?" a voice cried out.

"Mr. Wright-do you need help?"

"Mr. Wright?"

"Tadashi, what is it, what happened?"

Wrieto-San threw back the door of the Cord, waved away a dozen eager arms with a bellicose flick of his cane, and climbed out of the car to stand there erect in the drive, his shoulders thrown back and his eyes on fire, apparently none the worse for the loss of blood and the blast of icy wind. There were dull brown stains on the lapels of his overcoat and I noticed them now for the first time. His shirt-as crisply white and freshly starched as an apprentice could make it just that morning-was torn and bloodied and the crown of his hat was crushed. He said nothing. Just glared round him as if every man and woman present were responsible for what had befallen him, then turned on his heel and marched to the house. Only when he'd flung open the door and stepped into the shadows of his private quarters where none of us could follow, did he appear to break down. "Olgivanna!" we heard him bray in the voice of a schoolboy who'd skinned his knee on the playground. "Olgivanna, where in h.e.l.l are you?"

As soon as the door slammed shut, everyone turned to me. I was still seated behind the wheel of the Cord, my hair an unholy mess, my teeth rattling with the cold, reluctant to let go of the moment. Daisy was the one who brought me out of it. She was right there, leaning into me, her face suspended in the light of the windows as if it were floating free. She was unguardedly beautiful. She was talking to me. "Tadashi, come on now, we're dying to know what happened. And you must come in out of the cold-and have something to eat. I asked Emma to put a plate aside for you-"

And then her fingers were entwined in mine and we were heading for the kitchen, three-quarters of the apprenticeship at our heels even as I tried to reconstruct the story amidst a storm of shouts and expostulations. I was standing at the counter-pinned to it actually by the crush of bodies-an oven-warmed plate of plain wholesome gravy-drenched food in front of me, and everyone was talking at once. Wes, the giant, whose head and torso and ma.s.sive shoulders rose above us as if he were standing on stilts, cried out in a high strained voice: "It was Dunleavy, then-is that who it was? Dunleavy?"

"Yes," I told him and for the sixth time in as many minutes described the scene outside the hardware store and my part in it, all the while rubbing the side of my face (which hardly stung at all) to bring attention to the badge of honor I would wear for the next week and a half.

I didn't eat. Couldn't. The Fellowship-my companions and bunk-mates, mild men and women who honored ideas and the aesthetics of design above any physical expression of emotion-had been transformed into vigilantes, a lynch mob in the making. It was decided, by whom I no longer remember, that we would pile into a car-into my car, the Stutz-and drive to the Dunleavy farm and have it out. "We'll horsewhip him!" Wes roared as we charged out into the courtyard and he, Herbert, Edgar and I catapulted into the seats while the others shook their fists and hooted like Comanches. I fired up the engine and tore down the dark hill and into the night, their calls echoing in my ears.

It was Mrs. Dunleavy who came to the door in answer to our thunderous knock. She was in a housedress, wearing an ap.r.o.n. Her hair had fallen loose in a sloppy scatter of pins and loose ends. It was, I noticed now, the color of barnyard ordure. Her mouth began to work but she was too startled to speak.

"We want your husband," Wes said, and there was an ugly edge to his voice.

"And your son. Your son too," Herbert put in. He was just behind me, as wispy and pale as a child, and Edgar stood behind him, slapping a braided leather whip against one thigh. We were four. We were caught up in the moment. We thought only of vengeance.

I saw comprehension seep into Mrs. Dunleavy's eyes and along with it, fear and hate. Behind her, appearing on the scene like extras, were the two boys I'd seen that day just over a year ago when I was a young man of urban inclinations, lost in the wilds of the Wisconsin farm country, and their dog, bewhiskered and alert, a low warning growl caught in its throat. At that juncture I was going at full throttle, far beyond the pale of normalcy or civilized behavior. I actually spat on the floor between her two slippered feet. "He attacked the Master," I snarled, and it was as if I were reading the lines of a play, "-and now he's going to pay."

I don't know if Farmer Dunleavy or his rubicund son were at home that night (though there's no reason to imagine they weren't-it wasn't as if rural Wisconsin abounded in cultural divertiss.e.m.e.nts or that these ignorant half-civilized b.u.mpkins would have made use of them if there were) because Mrs. Dunleavy, with a suddenness and swiftness of movement that startled us all, slammed the door in our faces and drove the bolt to with a resounding clap. After which she apparently went directly to the telephone and called the sheriff. We stood on the porch in the faint yellowish glow of the porch light (until it was abruptly extinguished from inside the house), privately questioning our rashness and wondering what to do next, if only to save face with one another. Wes looked at me. I looked at Herbert. Herbert looked at Edgar. Then Wes turned back to the door and began hammering its cracked pine panels with the anvil of his fist. "I know you're in there, you coward!" he shouted, amidst a host of threats and accusations. "Come on out now! Take it like a man!" I began to feel embarra.s.sed.

A good deal of time went by-fifteen minutes or more-while we shuffled around on the porch, muttering imprecations and giving out with m.u.f.fled yelps of outrage for each other's benefit. There was no sound at all from inside the house, but for the occasional distant quarrel of the dog. I don't know which of us picked up the stone and shattered the front window, but the sound of the fragmenting gla.s.s operated on us like an alarm and we all broke simultaneously for the car.

Unfortunately, the sheriff was waiting for us just off State Highway 23 when we made the turnoff for Taliesin. All four of us were placed under arrest on a charge of a.s.sault and escorted, in handcuffs, to the county jail. The Bearcat was impounded. And we spent two days there, locked up like common criminals, before we came to trial, where we were allowed to plead guilty and absorb fines of fifty dollars each.

My father, rest his soul, never learned of it. But Wrieto-San did, of course. And he, in his turn, took Farmer Dunleavy to court, where he arrived in all his pomp and glory, swaggering behind his cane and surrounded by a formidable group of male apprentices (I am second from his right in the celebrated photograph that appeared in the Spring Green, Madison and Chicago papers). The farmer was found guilty of a.s.saulting Wrieto-San, lectured by the judge, sentenced to a week in jail and fined, after which he and his threadbare family found they could no longer sweat a living from the local soil and joined the impoverished hordes heading west for the promise of California. Needless to say, I'm not particularly proud of the role I played in all of this, nor of the fact that in the view of the officials of Iowa County, Wisconsin, I remain to this day a petty criminal, if not the very mark and model of the undesirable alien. In Wrieto-San's eyes, however, I was elevated into the select company of the very first rank of "his boys," so that in the months and years to come I would hear him wax sentimentally-and boastfully too-of how his boys had stood up for him when the chips were down. He would pause in the middle of one of his perorations, his eyes growing distant. "Yes sir," he'd say, "if there's one thing I can count on, it's my boys."

I see that perhaps I've gone on at too great a length concerning this period of Wrieto-San's life, in what is meant to serve, after all, merely as an introduction, but I do think these recollections should help to illuminate the character of the man whose greatness has touched us all. In closing, I should mention that my distinguished collaborator, Seamus O'Flaherty, is, in addition to the aforementioned translations, the author of two novels, The Ladies' Heat (not what you might think-its subject is women's track and field) and Kit and Caboodle (also a surprise-this work deals with a fictional detective agency established in Okinawa by two Englishmen, Jonas Kit and Malcolm Caboodle, in the years immediately following the conclusion of the second war). At this point, sadly, neither has found a publisher. And yet, as I'm sure you'll agree, O'Flaherty-San brings a unique artistic perspective to the text here as it unravels backward in time to attempt to define the true essence of Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, Wrieto-San, Wrieto-San, banzai!-the guiding light and enduring genius of all working architects, past, present and future.

CHAPTER 1: DIES IRAE.

August 1914. There was a war on in Europe, the Archduke Ferdinand a.s.sa.s.sinated, the old alignments breaking down, trenches dug, want and terror and ruin spreading outward like ripples on the surface of a pond, but the rumor of it barely touched him. Nothing touched him. A week ago he'd been as secure and genuinely happy as he'd ever been in his life, Mamah blossoming along with Taliesin, working on a book of her own and winning over the neighbor women with her G.o.d-given grace and charm and the long trailing diminuendo of her laugh, the scandals behind them and the hounds of the press onto other shames and miseries, his own work on Midway Gardens coming to fruition in a last-minute frenzy of alterations, subst.i.tutions, delays and shortages and the mad concentrated efforts of a cadre of men working against deadline, just the way he liked it. But now he was alone. Taliesin was in ashes. And Mamah was dead.

Past midnight on a day he couldn't name-Monday, Tuesday, what difference did it make?-he was sitting on the hill above the ruins of the house, crickets alive around him, roaring as if their lives would never end and the frost never come, fireflies aping the stars overhead, the gra.s.s lush, the trees burdened with fruit and the bitter reek of ash hanging over everything. Five hundred copies of the Was.m.u.th portfolio, printed on the finest German stock, were still smoldering in the bas.e.m.e.nt-even now he could segregate the smell of them, a thin persistent chemical stink of colored plates, elaborated plans and burned-out ideas-and when he turned his head he could see the deeper darkness, black smoke against the black sky and the dense textured shadows of the freestanding chimneys that were like the remains of a civilization gone down. Everything was still. And then, suddenly, a noise came at him, abrasive and harsh, the grind of boot heels amongst the cinders, and he caught his breath. There, a quick flare of light-a match lit and snuffed. Joseph, he thought, it's only Joseph, the farmer's son he'd hired to walk the property with a rifle to keep out the looters and anyone else who might want to do him harm.

Further harm. Fatal harm. The Barbadian was in the Dodgeville jail, but who knew if he had collaborators, a whole army of disaffected Negroes in white service jackets hunkered in the bushes over their hatchets and knives? He almost wished it were so. At least then he could do something to release the grief and rage boiling up in him. Literally boiling up. His back, from tailbone on up into the hair at the nape of his neck, was a plague of boils, inflamed suppurating sores, and he'd never in his life suffered so much as a pimple or blemish. It was as if what the gossipmongers were saying was true and verifiable, that divine justice had come down on his head for violating the laws of G.o.d and man in taking Mamah outside of marriage and then compounding the sin by establishing her in Taliesin as if to rub all their noses in it. Mamah had paid the ultimate price, yet he'd been spared by a fluke of fate, away in Chicago and so pressed and harried he'd taken to sleeping right there on the job site in a pile of shavings. Spared, as the editorialists had it, so he could twist and suffer for the rest of his life. Arson, murder, desolation, boils. What next-frogs dropping down from the heavens? Locusts?

They called it sin, the preachers denouncing him from their pulpits, crowing, gloating, and the newspapermen right there alongside them, but was there any such thing? He didn't believe in it any more than Mamah or Ellen Key did, not when it came to honest and loving relations between women and men, but how else could you explain what had happened? It was the G.o.d of Isaiah come down to lay his hand over the hillside, the G.o.d before whom Ein Tad83 had made him tremble when he was a boy. The words were on his lips now, involuntary and poisonous, but he could no more stop them than he could go back in time to stay the murderer's hand: " 'The gra.s.s withereth,' " he said aloud, the sound of his voice an a.s.sault on the solitude of the night, " 'the flower fadeth, because the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are gra.s.s.' "

He'd buried her himself. In a plain pine box fashioned by Billy Weston with his two burned hands and gashed scalp and it was no trouble for Billy, the smallest thing, because Billy was making a box of his own, child-size, for his son Ernest, murdered alongside Mamah and the others and laid out on the stones like a burnt offering. The box stood there in the courtyard, smelling of sap and shavings, isolate and actual, a thing he could touch and feel and run his hands over. White pine. The planed edges. But it was too small, wasn't it? Too reduced and confined for a spirit like hers, and his first thought was that Billy must have miscalculated. He kept stalking round it, unable to grasp the problem, to discover the solution in the conjoined boards and the light, shifting grain of the wood-architecture, it was only architecture-till his son John found him there. "Too small, too small," he kept muttering, closer then to breaking down than at any time since he'd stepped off the train. "No, Papa," John told him, "it's just right," and it was, he understood that finally. It was.

There were sickles hanging on hooks in the barn and he'd gone out there and fitted one to the grip of his hand, then took down the whetstone and sharpened the blade till it shone in the dense shifting August light. When he was satisfied he strode out to her flower garden and cut it to the ground in a fury of wide slashing strokes till his hands were wet with the ichor of the stems, a whole field of cut flowers lying there in sheaves, enough to fill a casket and a raw hole in the ground too. He chased off the undertaker. Chased them all off, the newspapermen, the farmers and their wives, the gawkers and gapers and bloodsuckers, the ones who never knew her and never would. He was the one who knew her, the only one, and he was the one who bent to bathe her in blooms, her own blooms, the ones she'd toiled over herself, petals opening to the sun and closed now forever. 84 Then he hitched up the sorrel team and led the funeral procession down the drive from the scorched ruins, along the county road to the Lloyd Jones family chapel and the churchyard behind it.

The service was brief because there was nothing to say, not as far as he was concerned, the blow so heavy, the weight of the pain, the punishment, and then he sent them all away-his sister Jennie, his son John, his brother-in-law Andrew Porter and the handful of others-and took up the shovel himself. Her husband-her former husband, a decent man, decent enough-wasn't there. Nor had he wanted to be. He was on the Chicago train, the train that stopped at every town and crossing, with two caskets of his own, caskets smaller even than the one Billy Weston had made for his son. There was the soft swish of the dirt sifting down into the hole, stones rattling against the planed corners of the box, the thump of a clod, a dangle of severed roots. Rain coming. The dirt smell. And then finally there was the raised mound and he was tamping it with the b.u.t.t of the shovel, dusk closing down against a sky roiled with clouds. The heat-the August heat-settled in till it was like another kind of fire burning up out of the ground. When the rain did come sometime past midnight, he was still there and though it soaked him through to the skin, it never cooled him.

But now, as he sat in the wet gra.s.s of the hillside and watched the moving point of light that was Joseph Williams' cigarette bisecting the planes of the night, a new feeling came over him, as if the ligature round his heart had been loosened by a single coil. She was dead and he wasn't and no amount of brooding or sorrow could amend that. It was as if she'd never existed or existed in another sphere altogether, a kind of permanent limbo to which he had no access. She was gone, in spirit and flesh, but here was the concrete evidence of her-Taliesin. What was left of it, anyway, the studio and back rooms, the garages and stables standing forlorn and abandoned, the place of the hill no arsonist or murderer could ever eradicate. He'd built it for her, as a refuge from the loose tongues and prying eyes of the biddies and gossips and Sunday saints who'd made her life a h.e.l.l, and in that moment he understood that he would build it again, all over again, as a monument to her.

It was the least he could do-or no, the only thing he could do, the right thing, the moral thing-and as he stared into the darkness where the main rooms had stood he was already devising plans against the backdrop of the night, seeing a new way to configure what had been razed to coordinate with the portion of the structure the fire had spared. And this was ordained too, else why had the conflagration stopped short of consuming the whole of the place if he hadn't been meant to rebuild?

When it came to it-and he was being honest with himself now-he'd never really been satisfied with the command of the rooms nor with the limited s.p.a.ce for guests and workers, and here was an opportunity to expand on the original, make the grand rooms grander, improve the sweep of the views and build out to the southwest, elongating the foot of the reversed L that gave the house its shape within the structure of the hill, strengthening the lines, improving the flow85 . . . He'd add a new wing for guests and servants' quarters and another for his aunts and his mother, just there, to the west. Enlarge the studio, redefine the courtyard. Make the s.p.a.ce more intimate and expansive at the same time. He could see it all as if it were standing there before him, graced with light.

He was so caught up in the concept he couldn't keep still and before he knew it he was rushing headlong in the dark, through the sodden gra.s.s and the clinging fabric of the night, down the slope and through the door to the studio, calling out to his watchman that it was all right, everything was all right. He had a rationale. He had a plan. Mamah, he would do it for Mamah. Spare nothing. Let the details dictate themselves, Taliesin II rising unshakably out of the ashes of Taliesin I as if Isaiah's Lord were the mildest and gentlest of shepherds leading the way.

He lingered there a week, eating little, sleeping less. The sores burst and his shirt stuck to his skin. He paced round the ruins, raked through the ashes for the charred fragments of his pottery, rode horseback over the hills, hair streaming and cape flying till he could have been a figure summoned by the Brontes, grieving all the while and yet planning too, the images coming to him in a flood he couldn't stop. But plans meant nothing sans the wherewithal to realize them, and at the end of the week he left orders with Billy Weston for the cleanup and went back to Chicago. And work.

At the time he was living in a rented house at 25 East Cedar Street, and when he returned he resolutely kept his mother at arm's length (he was grieving; he needed to be alone), and resisted overtures from his daughter Catherine (couldn't he use her help with the housekeeping?) even as he fought Kitty over his monthly payments to her and the disposition of the house in Oak Park where they'd raised the children together. There were projects on the board.86 People were making demands on him. The flow of funds at Midway Gardens had fallen off to a trickle, the finish work stalled even as audiences gathered every evening in an arena that cried out for completion. From the press he absorbed the sort of abuse to which he thought he'd become inured-LOVE BUNGALOW KILLINGS; WILD NEGRO CHEF SLAYS 7; WRIGHT AFFINITY SLAIN-but he felt he had no choice but to issue a statement to controvert the a.s.saults on Mamah's character, a woman who was better and stronger and more willing to live her ideals than any woman he'd ever known.87 In the midst of all this, he made the smallest of decisions-a staffing matter, nothing really, the sort of thing he'd dealt with a thousand times over the years-and another woman came into his life. He'd asked around about a housekeeper, someone efficient, quiet, reliable, who could see to his needs in Chicago and then in Spring Green when the renovation started-he was adrift without Mamah there to look after him. The dishes were a nuisance, piled up around the house with unrecognizable crusts of food fused to their surfaces, the rugs were filthy, the linens needed changing, he was running short of shirts and underwear-socks-and he was tired of having to send someone out to the laundry every other day. The smallest thing. That was all he needed. Someone to look after him.

The morning after he'd put out his inquiries-very early, before he'd even shaved or had a chance to think about eggs, frying pans and maple-cured bacon from the butcher down the street-there was a knock at the door. He was half inclined to ignore it. Who could it be at this hour-a newspaperman hoping to provoke him into providing copy for the evening edition? A creditor demanding payment? Fresh bad news? "Just a minute!" he shouted down the hall from the bathroom. And then, his voice rising in irritation, "Who is it?"

There was no answer, but the banging at the door continued, grew in volume even. He came out into the hall, beginning to feel alarmed-his nerves were on edge, of course they were-and he called out again. He glanced at his watch. It was quarter past six. Continued banging, peremptory, outraged. He went to the door and jerked it open.

A tiny wizened woman was standing there on the stoop, her shoulders rounded, her pale blue eyes rising up to him like gas bubbles in a bottle of seltzer water. She was dressed entirely in black, with b.u.t.ton-up shoes and a bonnet out of the last century.

"Yes?" he said, utterly bewildered. Was she lost? Anile? A charity case?

"I'm here to work," she said, her voice booming out at him as if she were shouting from across the street. She already had a hand on the door, was already pushing her way past him and into the house.

"But what are you doing?" he demanded. "Who are you?"

She stood there a moment, scanning the room, muttering under her breath. Then she set down her bag-and now he saw it, an ear trumpet-and started gathering up the plates in a way that was almost comical. But it wasn't comical. It was an intrusion. An irritation. He took her by the arm, the flesh there surprisingly firm, and wheeled her around. "Listen, ma'am, madam, you can't just-"