by Nancy Horan
THE NEXT MORNING as Mamah prepared to depart, Ellen embraced her at the front door. “You know, you were wound tight as a top when you arrived here,” she said. “Stay the course, daughter. But show yourself some kindness along the way.”
Mamah climbed up into the wagon.
“And get your picture made,” Ellen called to her, waving. “I’ll want it for my study.”
CHAPTER 27
The convent bell across the street from Villino Belvedere was pealing the hour when Mamah stepped into the garden. It was one of the morning sounds in Fiesole that she was growing accustomed to. Horse hooves clomping on stone, bakers’ trays thudding on a table a few doors away, an anvil clanking somewhere meant the workday had begun. From the apartment at the opposite side of the house, she heard the first sounds of bow on string from the Russian cellist and violinist who practiced every morning.
Frank was stretched out in a garden chair, eyes closed, face slanted up to the sun. “Another perfect day,” he said when he heard her footfall.
Frank had said the same thing every morning since she’d joined him, whether the village was fogged in or baking white in the sun. Everything about the hill town pleased him.
“Aren’t you working today?” she asked.
“Just for a couple of hours.”
“Let’s look at some old gardens. What do you say?”
“Haven’t we seen them all?”
“We haven’t seen Villa Medici yet. Estero says no one is there right now, and she knows the gardener.” Estero, the sweet-faced woman who cooked for them, had friends in every corner of Fiesole who were willing to help the nice couple from America.
“Is it far?”
“We can walk. I’ll see if she can get us in.”
“Eleven o’clock,” he called as he went down the steps to the lower level of the house where he had his studio.
The days shaped themselves in just this way, their cadence tuned to the sun’s rise and the midday meal. By eight-thirty they were both at their own posts, though some mornings Mamah slipped into the studio room to watch Frank and Taylor Woolley delicately tracing drawings onto thin paper with crow quills dipped in ink.
She did her own work in the smaller of the house’s two gardens, this one sheltered under an arbor heavy with yellow roses that ran along the edge of the terrace. From the round garden table situated next to a wall that separated her from a terrifying drop-off, she could look out upon the red tile roofs of Florence.
She took her time translating Love and Ethics. She toyed with phrases, consulted her dictionary, framed and reframed sentences. She wanted to honor the work by getting it right. And when she did, when she poured the German translation of Ellen’s wisdom through the filter of her own soul, when it distilled into elegant, persuasive English sentences right there on the paper, something very much like ecstasy came over her.
She lived outside as much as she could, leaving her translating some mornings to hike up Via San Francesco to the ancient church and monastery at the top of the hill. The spot was one of a dozen destinations she had, though her hikes through poppy-covered meadows all seemed to culminate in the same way. She would find a place to sit and stare out at the hills until calm swept over her like a stupor. When half-moons of brown skin appeared on her back and chest from her hours in the sun, she found a hat with a broader brim.
“Mamah of the Hills!” Frank saluted her one morning when she emerged from the house into the garden wearing the floppy hiking hat. Henceforth, it was his pet name for her.
Mamah’s June arrival in Fiesole had coincided with Taylor Woolley’s return there. He and Frank’s son Lloyd had both worked on the portfolio during late winter and spring, first in Florence and then in Fiesole, where Frank rented Villino Belvedere from an Englishwoman who owned several places in town. When Lloyd and Taylor had finished the bulk of their drawings, Frank set the two of them free with money in their pockets for sightseeing. At the end of their tour, Lloyd had gone home (probably to avoid her, she thought), but Taylor returned to Fiesole to work.
She found Taylor Woolley the gentlest and most discreet of young men. He was a Mormon boy of twenty-six, with a slender build and a pronounced limp. Fifteen years separated them, but she discovered in the young architect from Salt Lake a fit companion for her walks in the hills.
Often the three of them took the tram down into the city to wander through the great cathedrals. They spent whole days in the Uffizi Gallery, studying the statues of Donatello and Michelangelo, thirteenth-century paintings of the Virgin, portraits of red-garbed cardinals with backgrounds of Tuscan landscapes. They collapsed on benches, let their heads fall back, only to see gilded ceilings flocked with angels, before they had to leave, exhausted from sheer satiety.
Taylor carried a small camera but rarely pointed it at the churches of Florence. Instead, he photographed the city’s loose patchwork pattern from above, capturing the edges of rectangles fringed with cypress trees. He was taken with the ancient Roman roads and the houses that clung to hills so steep the steps leading to their doors looked like ladders. Mamah went with him sometimes, seeking out the most hair-raising precipices near Villino Belvedere from which to photograph the city below.
One afternoon he took her out to an overlook and taught her how to operate the camera. From where they stood, Florence seemed awash in a white river that shifted and swirled, revealing a street here, a tall building there, before it covered over everything. Taylor and Mamah took turns peering through his viewfinder, waiting for the fog to open and reveal a particular villa they had noticed before. The great house rose from time to time, like an island, out of the roiling mist.
“Let me take your photograph,” Mamah said. Taylor posed patiently on a stone wall while she shifted the camera to compose the picture. All the while, they talked about their childhoods. She noticed how careful Taylor was not to touch on her more recent history. Nor did he ask to photograph her.
MAMAH AND FRANK set out from the heavy green door of Villino Belvedere as the morning heated up, carrying a knapsack containing a lunch prepared by Estero. By now they were a familiar sight to the locals as they walked hand in hand up and down the ancient roads, he with a walking stick tucked under his sleeve, she in the wide-brimmed hat. By noon they stood in the upper terraced garden of Villa Medici.
It was a grand, faded place, bound on one side by a long rose-laden pergola next to the hillside, and on the other side by a sweeping view of the River Arno meandering through Florence. The terraced garden was one of three green rooms that stepped down the hillside. There was no central outdoor staircase connecting the garden tiers. One entered each garden from the house or from the sides via little paths.
“Gardens say so much about a culture, don’t they?” Mamah was thinking out loud and breathing heavily from climbing. “You really see what the people value.”
Frank stood within earshot when she spoke, but he didn’t respond. She knew he was gone somewhere else, lost in absorbing the space. She had learned to leave him alone at these moments.
He walked the pebble paths, climbed up and down the hillside, paced through the separate outdoor rooms around the villa, studied the house from a distance. The stucco looked golden. Up close, though, it appeared moments from collapse.
No one was home, and the gardener insisted they take their lunch under the pergola.
“See those trees?” Mamah said, gesturing out toward a pair of cypress trees framing the view of the hills beyond. “They’ve been placed there purposely, like exclamation points, as if to say, ‘Look at this! Isn’t it something?’”
Frank was observing the hill opposite them. “Mmm. I was noticing those little houses hanging on to the hillside. They seem as natural there as the trees and rocks.”
“How characteristic,” Mamah said, “that I am agog over this glorious house and garden, and you’re eyeing the mud huts.”
“I see the garden.” Frank smiled. “It reminds me of Japan.”
She
pretended to glower at him. “I brought you up here thinking you would look at these terraces. That you would sit under a pergola just like this one, and you would talk about how these terraces blur the line between house and nature. I thought I was rather clever, engineering this little outing.”
“You did, did you?”
“Yes, I figured you would say, ‘Mamah, this is where I want to live with you forever. Let me build a villa for us on that hill over there.’ And I would swoon and say yes. Instead, you say it reminds you of Japan.”
He laughed. “But I was thinking about something else. I was noticing how the farmers till the land here. And it brought to mind the Japanese farmers, who make the most beautiful lined terraces for their crops, which step down, similar to this. So you look around you from your beautiful home, and you see the hand of man on the land.”
“You don’t see wilderness? Isn’t that what Frank Lloyd Wright wants to see?”
“I want to see some wild land, yes. But…”
“But man is part of nature,” she said.
“Yes, as much as any living thing. These patterns we make in farming and using the land—they’re ancient images, really, ingrained in our psyches, I think, so we just naturally see them as beautiful. The farmer doesn’t start out planting crops to be artistic. He’s practical. He’s going to work with the contours of his fields. But the rhythm of the land finds a way of asserting itself, making the farmer create beautiful wavy lines with his wheat fields in Umbria, or grids somewhere else. If you do the land’s bidding, you can build a house that’s organic to it.”
“How do you feel about this place?”
“I think a man who loved buildings made these gardens rather than a gardener. I admire it—to a degree.”
“I mean Italy. How do you feel about Italy?”
“Can’t you tell? You’d be a fool not to feel the magic of it. The hills…”
“Let me guess. They remind you of Wisconsin.”
“They do.” He shrugged, smiling. “Very much.”
THE NEXT DAY they took the tram that ran down the pine-scented road into Florence. Once they reached the town, they decided to forgo the museums and climb up the hill that led to Piazzale Michelangelo. Frank walked her by Villino Fortuna, the first house he had rented when he arrived in Florence.
“We were freezing in there,” he said. “Lloyd and Taylor and I had to warm our fingers over a fire just to get them working.” Only three or four months had elapsed since he’d inhabited the house, but he painted the picture as if it had happened long ago. Frank did that. He could make a legend out of a happenstance.
Near the top, they rested on a bench by a small church. Frank walked over to stand next to the building, watching workmen dye the stucco with an ocher color. Jasmine climbed up and around the door, but through the vine, Mamah could read words carved in stone.
“There’s a phrase over the door,” she called to him. “‘Haec est porta coeli.’”
A browned workman with a kerchief around his forehead looked up from his stucco, trying to understand their conversation.
“My Latin’s rusty,” Frank called back. “What does it say? We’re all going to hell?”
“No, no,” she shouted back. “‘Here is the gate to heaven.’”
They were too tired to return to Fiesole in the afternoon, so they took a room at an inn near the Piazza della Repubblica. That evening they ate dinner in a café on the plaza. She and Frank watched the early-evening strollers. A well-dressed couple promenaded elegantly; an old man pushing a cart full of rubble hurled himself forward, the echoes of his cart’s wheels clapping against the surrounding buildings. Near them, another pair of travelers huddled over a small table, their dialogue a low hum.
“Take your time, madam, and enjoy the pageant,” the waiter said when Mamah told him they were not ready to order yet. “This is my favorite part of the day.”
“Have you worked here in the piazza long?”
“Sí, signora. Twelve years at this hotel. I never tire of it. I have a small place, a room near here,” he said. “It’s all I need. The piazza is the Italian’s parlor. I receive my friends here.”
“Have you traveled away at all?”
“No. Why should I? The world eventually comes to me, right here in the piazza.”
Mamah laughed and translated the conversation for Frank.
“Now ask the gentleman if I may buy this white tablecloth, as I am about to draw on it.”
The waiter shrugged. “Non c’e problema.”
Mamah ordered soup for them.
“Ask him to hold off serving it, would you?” Frank moved the glasses aside. He took from a small bag a blue colored pencil he’d bought to add to a collection he’d begun in Berlin. He quickly sharpened it with a small knife he carried in his breast pocket, then drew an irregularly curving line on the white cloth and sketched some rectangles pressed into the curve. He was drawing upside down for her benefit, but the geometric forms were clearly parts of a house set into the side of a hill. More curving lines appeared, outlining a river and more hills.
“Villa Medici had three levels, didn’t it?” she asked.
Frank continued to draw, penciling in trees and roads. On one hill, he covered the curves with patchwork gardens. “This isn’t Villa Medici.”
“Oh.” Mamah’s finger traced the curving line at the bottom of the drawing. “I thought this was the Arno.”
“You’re close,” he said. “It’s a river, but not the Arno. It’s the Wisconsin River.”
She bent her head toward the drawing.
“There is a hill,” he said, “one I visited often as a boy, near my grandfather’s homestead, where my aunts run their school. That hill was a magical place for me then. Summers, when I was working my uncle’s farm, I would go there to get away from everyone and just sit, looking down on the treetops. The hill is big and round—like the top of a head. I want to put a house just below the crown of that hill, Mamah. Our house.”
Mamah felt a sinking sensation inside.
“I dream about this house all the time,” he said. “It backs itself up into that hillside and has wings that embrace the hill. It’s made of the same limestone that pushes out of the earth all over Wisconsin, so it looks like a great outcrop of rock. And it has a courtyard like the one we saw at Villa Medici. You’ll have gardens all around you, Mamah. You’ll walk from indoor room to outdoor room and never even feel where the house ends and the fresh air begins.”
There was a fierce excitement in his eyes. “I want to farm there,” he said. “I want to cover these other hills with fruit trees. Just allow yourself for one minute to imagine the perfume of a hundred apple trees. Can you smell it? And vegetables—tons of them. We’ll grow our own food in ribbons across the hills.”
Mamah stared at him sadly.
“I’m not crazy, Mamah. It’s within our reach. I’ve already written to my mother about it.”
“You have?”
“I think she would buy the land for me. No one will be the wiser until it’s built.”
“You’ve never said you’d—”
“We can live in peace there. I’ll run my practice from up there, maybe keep a small office in Chicago, and you can translate, garden, do what you love. Yes, there are mostly farm folks there, but we’ll figure out a way to bring some culture to Spring Green. We’ll get the world to come to us.”
“There’s no place for me back there right now,” Mamah said. “Not even in Wisconsin. Anyway, I’ve put it all out of my mind. Please, Frank, we’re in Italy—”
“Look,” he said. “My family goes back three generations in that valley. That counts for something—people will be civil. It’s utterly private, only three hours by train from Chicago. Our children will come to stay with us.”
She watched pigeons swoop across the piazza. “I know how you love Wisconsin, Frank. But…” She sat up and looked him in the eye. “Just for me,” she began, “would you design a house for us in this
place? The children could live with us part of the year here. Maybe your children could come during the other part.”
“Mamah.” Frank stroked her hand tenderly. “You’re dreaming. Italy is no more my home than—”
Mamah pulled her hand away. “Is Oak Park my home? Or Wisconsin? I don’t have a home anymore. At least in Italy I’m anonymous.”
The waiter arrived at the table with two large bowls of soup. He looked at the drawing, then tentatively at Mamah and Frank, waiting for some signal. Finally, Frank motioned to him, and he put the bowls down, covering the pencil sketch.
CHAPTER 28
At Villino Belvedere, late evenings were given over to books. Sometimes Frank read aloud, then talked with her about the passages.
“‘Blue color,’” he read from Ruskin one evening, “‘is everlastingly appointed by the Deity to be a source of delight.’” Back and forth they went, debating the best blues—azure, cobalt, cornflower, the blue of the Mediterranean. Or the subtle differences of orange-reds—Venetian versus Chinese versus Cherokee red.
If the translating had gone well that day, Frank was treated to nuggets from Love and Ethics. But they avoided any more talk of Wisconsin or the hill crown.
One morning when the sun was particularly hot, Mamah stepped down into the make-do studio to cool off. Frank had furnished it sparsely with objects that pleased him—a wool scarf laid over a table, topped by a fat glazed pot full of tree branches, architectural drawings pinned to the floral wallpaper, a small shelf lined with simple Italian vases. He and Taylor were quietly working at separate tables.
She walked over to Frank, putting one hand on his shoulder to glance at what he was working on.
“Well, you’ve caught me,” he said.
She laughed. “Caught you doing what?”
“Just look for a moment.”
He was working on a pair of drawings arranged on a single page, one above the other.
“It’s my house,” she said of the top picture. Marion Mahony’s elaborately drawn foliage curled around the corners of the picture and spilled over the terrace wall. It was the very drawing that had sold her and Edwin on Frank’s design back in 1903.
