by Nancy Horan
“And you fell into them?”
He smiled. “I did. Flower blossoms first, of course, because they’re so seductive. But then I saw how the stalk inevitably led to the leaf and bloom. It didn’t matter what plant I looked at. The structure was always sound, and the design essentials were all there: proportion, scale, unity of idea. Mind you, I was just a boy pulling things apart at that point.”
“Did you always know you wanted to be an architect?”
“Absolutely. For as long as I can remember. The idea of building shelters that let you feel you are living out in the open—that came later. But the instinct—the feeling for it—was seeded in me out there on the hillside. So, when I went to the university to study, I was excited because I had all these ideas about organic architecture based on how nature works out its building projects. But nobody wanted to talk about architecture that way. It was all about Palladian windows or Corinthian columns. So I left school.”
“That’s when you came to Chicago.”
“Yup. Apprenticed myself to Silsbee at nineteen, and moved on to Sullivan’s office a year later.”
A strong wind was blowing, pushing the grasses and wildflowers eastward.
“You landed in good hands.”
“Didn’t I tell you some of this when we worked on the house?”
“Yes, but not all of it.”
“Well, Sullivan was a marvelous teacher, and I was the pencil in his hand. He was continually talking about making American buildings. By the time I left him to start my own practice, I was bent on doing something new—making houses that speak of this prairie land rather than some French duke’s notion of what a house should look like.”
Mamah pulled wind-whipped strands of hair away from her mouth. “Was it always houses with you?”
“I couldn’t think of anything more noble than making a beautiful home. Still can’t.”
He gestured out toward the horizon, where a clear sky bordered prairie grasses as far as the eye could see. “Eventually, I fell under the spell of that line out there. It was so simple: a huge block of blue on top of a block of gold prairie, and the quiet line between heaven and earth stretching endlessly. It felt like freedom itself to look at the horizon. I had been drunk on forms since I was a boy, and here was this simple line that expressed so much about this land.”
Mamah watched his hands. Whenever he talked about architecture, his hands spoke their own language, moving gracefully as he formed right angles with thumb and forefinger, or mimicked planes with the flat of his palm.
“Of course, the horizon isn’t a perfectly straight line, but I wasn’t out to imitate it, anyway. I wanted to abstract it in a way that expressed the essence of it. When I began stacking one horizontal plane on top of another—parallel to the prairie, as I did in your house—the homes I designed began to look and feel grounded, like they belonged in this place.” Frank glanced quickly at her. “Am I boring you?”
“Not at all. In fact, you reminded me just then of when I was a small child. We were living in Iowa, and there was still prairie all around in those days,” Mamah said. “My father would put me on his shoulders so I could get the big view, and he’d talk about the wildflowers and grasses and clouds. He had a name for the bottom of the sky—‘the hem of heaven.’”
Frank smiled. “I like that.” He fell silent for a while.
“You were talking about organic architecture,” she said.
“It’s the only kind of architecture that makes sense to me. It’s all I want to do now.”
“Then you must do it. In fact, I think it’s your destiny.”
He let out a laugh and embraced her. “Do you know what’s wonderful about you, Mamah? You understand things others can’t begin to grasp. People think I’m being sentimental, eulogizing the prairie because it’s nearly gone. But that’s not what I’m after.”
She felt awkward and extricated herself from his arms. What am I after, she wondered, that I court disaster standing here in this field with you?
They moved apart. The wind seemed to have calmed some.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “It’s just such a relief to talk. It’s so easy with you. The truth is, I live a pretty stultifying existence at home. I love my children, but…” He shrugged. “My life is not in them the way Catherine’s is. Her whole being is invested in them. I’ve done the same thing with my work, I know—taken refuge in it. But she and I have reached an impasse. And we are too far gone to fix it.”
Mamah thought, Take me home. They had left the safe territory of architecture. “People change over time,” she said. “I think it happens in a lot of marriages.”
Frank waited.
“That’s not what happened in my case, though,” she said. “I was mature enough—too mature. My head trumped my heart.” She looked at the ground, ashamed to betray Edwin in this way. “Ed is a good, decent man,” she said. “We’re just mismatched.” She did not confide what she’d been feeling these days. That lately, when her husband came into the same room, she felt as if the air had been sucked right out of it.
By the third day, there was no use pretending. There were furtive caresses, followed by long silences.
On the fourth morning, Mamah awoke nauseated and knew almost immediately. She called Frank’s office and left a message with his secretary: Mrs. Cheney is unable to meet today.
When he appeared unannounced the following Tuesday, she kept the screen door closed when she told him she would not see him again. Standing on the stoop, he looked stricken.
She put her palm on the wire mesh between them. “Frank,” she said, tipping her head back so the tears wouldn’t breach. “I just found out.” She forced cheer into her voice. “Ed and I are expecting a baby.”
MAMAH SNAPPED FROM her reverie, climbed out of the tub, and returned to the bedroom, where she stared blankly into the closet.
I miss our talks. Had he said that to other women? In the two years since the day she’d told him she was pregnant, she’d seen Frank driving his Stoddard-Dayton around town with one woman after another next to him. People called his car the “Yellow Devil” not only for its color and speed but also, she suspected, for his devil-may-care attitude about gossip. It was humiliating to think that he might regard her as he did those other clients or prospective clients or whoever they were.
When Mamah glanced at the clock, she realized she had only half an hour before Frank was scheduled to appear. She put on a white waist and black skirt, dug into her jewel box for the thin gold chain with one fat pearl. Brushing her hair into a twist at the back of her head, she leaned in close to the mirror to examine her face. She knew she’d done too much of that lately, looking for more evidence, as if she needed it, that she was nearly thirty-nine years old.
As a thin child, she had thought her features were freakish—a pole neck, a square jaw out of proportion to the rest of her, wide high cheekbones that earned her the nickname “bone face” in the schoolyard. Her horn spectacles had hidden the green eyes her father said were pretty. Only the arching brows might have been acceptable had they not behaved so infuriatingly. They gave away everything. “You’re angry,” her mother would say, studying the roiling black line across her forehead.
Around the age of eighteen, she had grown into her face. Her clumsy limbs became supple, and she found herself moving through the world with a new ease. The boys who had taunted her suddenly came calling.
With her hair swept up now, the long neck looked pretty with the pearl resting in the shell-like dip between her collarbones. She touched cologne on her wrist, took off her glasses, and closed the bedroom door.
CHAPTER 4
“Where is everyone?” Frank asked when he stepped into the foyer. He handed her the rolled-up drawings he carried under his arm and removed his long silk scarf.
“Lizzie and Louise took the children down to Marshall Field’s.” She felt awkward as she waited to take his coat, standing so close to him that she could smell the fragrance of the
shaving cream he’d used. He was no taller than she, and his eyes—always so direct—were level with her own and impossible to avoid. He looked to be glowing; his face was ruddy from the cold.
“Ah, Field’s,” he said, inhaling with mock serenity, “the pinnacle of civilization.”
“It’s always matters of taste with you, isn’t it?” Mamah teased, showing him into the dining room.
“Well…” He rolled his eyes toward some syrupy pink carnations on the sideboard. She’d bought them at a greenhouse.
“I know. You’d rather see some old dead branch. But I like them.”
“That’s good.”
“Don’t patronize me, Frank Wright,” she said, half serious. “I’m not some client’s wife who lets you dress her.” The words came out wrong, but he knew what she meant. She wasn’t one of those women who permitted him—paid him—to design her china, her linens, even her dresses so she looked right in a Wright house. She wasn’t going to let him tell her she couldn’t put pink flowers on her mantel.
“I’ve never thought of you as some client’s wife. Not for a minute.”
Already, she thought. She sat down at the table, smoothed the drawings flat. “Where were we when we left off on this project? It’s been a while.”
He took a chair across from her. “We were talking about true things.” His voice took on an edge. “Things that kept me sane for a time. Or don’t you remember?”
“I do.”
“Do you recall when you first came to see me at the studio? You had just been through Arthur Huertley’s house. You quoted Goethe. You called it ‘frozen music.’”
“It’s true. I wanted to dance right through that house.”
Frank shook his head. “I can’t begin to tell you the impression you made. Here was this beautiful woman, so articulate and gifted, who comprehended…Tell me something, Mamah. In all those hours we spent together, was I the only one feeling that wonder?”
She stared at her hands in her lap. “No.”
“So it wasn’t my imagination?”
Mamah looked up at him. So quickly, she thought. I am putty in your hands so quickly. She hesitated, pressed her lips together. “Do you remember my third visit to the studio?”
“Third?”
“Well, I do,” she said, “vividly. Your secretary let me in. I was early for an early appointment, so it must have been about eight-thirty in the morning. A big fire was already going in the fireplace. You were up on the balcony chatting with that artist—”
“Dickie Bock.”
“Yes.” Mamah drew in a breath. “He was up there sculpting away. I remember that you didn’t see me because I was off in a corner. Then Marion Mahony came in, and she didn’t see me, either. I must have been in shadow.” Mamah smiled, remembering the pleasure of watching the morning unfold at the studio.
“Marion looked so stylish,” she said. “She had on a heavy coat and a paisley turban. I can see it now. You looked down at her and said, ‘What is that thing on your head?’ I wanted to giggle out loud, but I kept quiet because she seemed wounded at first. She said, ‘Don’t you like it?’
“You came over to the railing then and teased her. You said, ‘On a magician, I like it.’ And without missing a beat, she shot back at you, ‘I am a magician.’”
Frank let out a belly laugh.
“Do you remember what you did then?” Mamah asked.
He shrugged.
“You put up your hands in surrender.”
Frank was grinning now. “She thinks she performs miracles for me.”
“Does she?”
“She keeps me sharp. She’s quick with the repartee.”
“Well, let me tell you something. I wanted to be Marion Mahony that day, more than you can imagine. I wanted to begin every morning by making you laugh out loud.” Here I go again, she thought, feeling her eyes growing moist. “To sit next to you, to look up and see someone sculpting…. To feel the creative energy swirling in that room…. That day in the studio, I longed to be someone you absolutely counted on. The truth is, I still do.”
Frank reached out his hand and ran it over her brow, then down one side of her face. His forefinger touched the pearl at her throat.
Mamah felt her heart racing. “Do you always fall in love with your clients?”
“Only once,” he said. “Only one.”
He stood up, took her hand, and led her to the sofa in the living room, where he gently eased her down. They lay together for some time, her head on his chest, before his hands began to move. His wrist bones cracked as he unbuttoned her shirtwaist and put his mouth to her breast. A rill of electricity shot down her body, yanked up her hips. Her hands were seeking him, struggling frantically against fabric. In a moment his whole length was next to her, the naked landscape of his body gliding over hers, as they wordlessly found a common rhythm.
CHAPTER 5
It was a summer of breathtaking risks.
For every careful plan, there was a careless visit. She would hear a knock on the door and find Frank standing there with his shirtsleeves rolled up and the blueprint for the garage under his arm, as if he had just popped over to settle a small detail.
Most of the time Louise and the children were at home. On those days he would get down on his knees and play with them, hauling John and Martha and their playmates around on his back while Mamah sat on the window seat in the library, fiddling with her skirt, balling up the linen, then smoothing it out again. She wondered if her jitteriness was apparent to Louise, if the sparks flicking like fireflies under her skin showed on the outside.
“You look radiant,” Mamah said one afternoon when Frank came through the door. He had a lilt in his step and his eyes were twinkling. His face and forearms were burnished from hours outside at work sites. Standing in the library, he glanced around the other rooms.
“They’re in Forest Park,” she said. “They all went over to the amusement park. About an hour ago.”
Frank tossed the drawings onto the window seat, put his hand behind her waist, and swirled her around the tiny library as if they were in a ballroom.
“Frank,” she protested, laughing. She felt exposed next to the open, un-curtained windows. Once, at the end of a dinner party, she had sat on the window seat with another woman, both of them drinking wine and smoking cigarettes. She’d looked up to see the Belknap girls gazing down on her from their bedroom window next door, and she’d had a distinct sense of being spied on. Was anybody up there now? It was impossible to tell. She tried to lead him to a back room, but he was pulling her down to the floor, and then it was too late. Their loving was muffled and furious.
Afterward, briefly, she lay with her head in the hollow of his shoulder, listening for footfalls on the pavement. Sunlight slanted over the roof next door and fell hot on her legs.
“It’s going to be the best damned garage in Oak Park,” Frank said, stroking her hair, “but it could take years to finish.”
IT FRIGHTENED HER TO FEEL so out of control. But any thoughts of ending the affair floated away the minute he set foot in the same room. Frank Lloyd Wright was a life force. He seemed to fill whatever space he occupied with a pulsing energy that was spiritual, sexual, and intellectual all at once.
And the wonder of it was, he wanted her.
When she looked in the mirror, she saw a woman pink-faced from desire. And from being desired. My Lord, what a narcotic! She hadn’t felt such a sense of power since she was a twenty-year-old college girl with a clutch of suitors.
“Ring me once and hang up, then I’ll call you back,” Frank instructed her. She did that only a couple of times. Isabelle, his assistant, would pick up, and Mamah would quickly lose her nerve. Instead she waited for him to contact her, and the waiting nearly killed her.
LATER THAT SUMMER, when Frank took office space downtown in the Fine Arts Building, their trysts became easier. Mamah used the excuse of a Wednesday-afternoon class to get out of the house. She took the train into Chicago, walked
to Michigan Avenue, and went up in the elevator to the tenth floor. Once, as she hurried down the hallway hoping not to meet anyone, the door across from Frank’s opened, and she caught a glimpse of Lorado Taft chiseling in his studio. Mamah knew the famous sculptor was a longtime friend of Frank and Catherine. He had looked up from his work that day, caught her eye, and smiled in a disturbing, knowing sort of way. Burning with embarrassment, Mamah slipped into Frank’s office, sank down on a chair, bent over, and put her face in her lap. After that, she wore a large bonnet with a scarf over its crown and tied under her chin, as if she’d just stepped out of an automobile.
Another time, as she emerged from the elevator, she spotted a neighbor, one of his old clients, standing in the hall at the door of Frank’s office, taking his leave. She bent her head so her hat hid her face, then walked down the steps to the floor below. Standing there in the stairwell, waiting, she could hear some would-be Paderewski pounding out a piano concerto. From another room, a teacher’s voice called out positions above the soft thud of ballet slippers.
Her own heart was thudding by the time she returned to the tenth floor. When she was safe inside his office, he locked the door and pulled the shades down over his windows. They picked up the thread of their almost-life together then, opening up to each other in the darkened room.
They longed to be out in the world, taking it in together. Early in the summer, when they were being extra cautious, they arranged to arrive separately at a downtown nickelodeon where a Tom Mix movie was showing. Sitting a couple of rows from him, she could hear Frank’s deep laugh explode throughout the movie, and that sent her into gales. Frank left before she did. The plan was for her to walk to the corner so he could pick her up there. When she got out on the street, she noticed that an enterprising vendor had set up a display of cowboy hats right outside the theater. She stopped and impulsively picked out a wide-brimmed tan hat.
