Loving Frank

by Nancy Horan

  “It’s everywhere, is it not? I understand why. But I’m confounded by the end result of it all—people bowing down before statues. Where’s the God in that?” He stood up and opened another bottle of wine. She took note of it because she had stopped drinking, and Taylor, a devout Mormon, had partaken only of water all evening. Frank usually drank very little, if at all.

  “It’s pretty much settled here in Italy,” he said as he poured the wine. “It would be hard indeed to practice modern architecture in a country with traditions as set as Italy’s. But in America this is the moment. The landscape is yours for the building. You’re a young man in architecture, Woolley, no obligations.”

  “You’re not exactly old, Mr. Wright.”

  “No,” Frank mused, “and I have no plans of rolling over, though I can count on two hands the people who wish I would. But if we’re ever going to achieve an architecture of our own in America—a democratic architecture that expresses the spirit of the place—then we have to change the way we teach young minds. Is there a university-trained architect in America today whose head hasn’t been filled with Beaux Arts crap? They’re all decorators, for Christ’s sake!” Frank was pacing now. “We need to show young people there’s more to design than the Greek column. What happened to the spirit of individualism? My God, isn’t that what our democracy is supposed to be about? Yet what are America’s architects doing? They’re mimicking the architectural traditions of monarchies!”

  He stopped in his tracks, his eyes wide. “I could change all that. I really could. Give me a handful of young unschooled minds, and we’ll change the face of America. Never mind classrooms with blackboards. And the only book they’d need would be Viollet-le-Duc’s. Discourses on Architecture—they could read it themselves. That’s what I did. Beyond that, my drafting table would be the classroom. I would take them through the process of discovery. Let them watch me. When they’re true problem solvers, they’ll be worthy of the title ‘architect.’ And they will go out and change the world.”

  Frank sat down and talked on, with Taylor listening intently, but Mamah drifted on the edge of the conversation. The music from next door was softer now. She wanted to remember every detail of the night—the food and music and cameraderie, Frank’s white shirt glowing in the candlelight, the black valley below them twinkling with lights. It was almost eleven when she realized she’d forgotten Taylor’s gifts.

  She fetched two slim packages she had wrapped up—her dog-eared Italian and German dictionaries, each with a different inscription. She presented them to him, and he seemed pleasantly embarrassed. Frank gave him a fine pen.

  The candles burned down, and they grew quieter. No one seemed to want to leave the table. When she looked across at Frank, though, she saw tears dripping down his cheeks.

  Mamah stood up. “I hate to say good night, but I’m so tired, Taylor. Will I see you in the morning?” She helped Frank to his feet. He slid away from her hands, then stumbled inside without a word.

  “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No, no, Taylor, it’s all right. He’s exhausted, I think.”

  She found Frank hunched over the upright piano in the parlor, picking out some old tune on the keys. She approached him and put her hand on his shoulder.

  “I’m going back,” he said. He stopped playing.

  Mamah stood still, waited.

  He began to rub his eyes. It was something he did, a tic, when he had something hard to say. “Not to Catherine. But to the children. Do you understand?”

  She couldn’t speak.

  “My practice is in shambles. The people I trained are stealing my work, passing off my ideas as theirs.” His face was more agonized than angry. “If any of them ever wanted to do work of their own, I encouraged them, gave them a place to draft after hours. I swore when I started the studio that I would never punish anybody for being ambitious, the way I was fired by Sullivan for doing after-hours work. But this isn’t ambition. It’s theft.”

  He looked up at her. “I haven’t visited a work site or had honest dirt under my fingernails in a year. It’s against my nature,” he said softly. “I need to build. It’s ludicrous—my sitting here in an Italian villa, talking about democratic architecture. Staying here is impossible for me.”

  “Why did you let me believe?” She felt a fury rising inside.

  Frank began to weep. “I can’t live with myself. Their letters…”

  He was talking of his children’s letters. She had seen them, and they weren’t very different from the ones she got—sweetly scrawled childish words, misspelled sometimes. I am seven years old, John had last written. As if she had forgotten.

  “I’ve received the same letters,” she said. She hated the bitterness in her own voice.

  “I never meant to harm them. I always hated the sound of the word ‘Papa.’ Now…” Frank’s shoulders shook as he sobbed. “I thought if they could just see a life lived out in front of them that was honest, that was dedicated to something—it would be the best I could do for them.” He dabbed a tear with his thumb. “I never dreamed it would come to this.”

  Her whole body ached with anger. And shame at being angry. “Neither did I,” she said.

  MAMAH SLEPT LITTLE that night. Before daylight, she tiptoed downstairs to his studio and went to his drafting table. When she found Frank’s first simple sketch of the Italian villa tucked underneath the more detailed version he had shown her, she pulled it out of the stack, rolled it up, and set it aside.

  Taylor would be there in a couple of hours to collect the last of his items and be on his way. She wanted to memorize this place before Frank began to pack up, before it became one more disassembled camp. She knew where Frank kept his correspondence, in a cigar box in the corner. The twinge of guilt she felt perusing his letters was overruled by the anger still simmering inside.

  Looking through the box, she found no evidence that Catherine had written to him. Mamah supposed Frank had thrown those letters away, for there had been some. But he had kept his children’s notes. And a letter from his mother expressing her sorrow that he hadn’t replied to her many letters.

  Mamah noticed another long letter from a minister in Sewanee, Tennessee, dated May 14, 1910. Mamah couldn’t discern the signature, but the tone was that of an old friend. He was answering Frank’s request for advice; point by point, he explained to Frank why he must abandon his foolish rebellion with Mamah.

  The minister knew Frank well enough not to use scripture on him. Instead, he seemed to be challenging Ellen Key’s ideas, which Frank had obviously outlined in a letter to him. The minister talked of how wrong it was for the exceptional individual to go against the social order. If an ordinary man does, it has few long-term consequences. But for Frank it would be disastrous, as his God-given gifts would be used up in his fight with society. And that would be a great loss to the world.

  Even if Mamah were the most heavenly of beings, he said, even if they both secured divorces and managed to create a wonderful new home together, Frank would be robbing his children of his full presence in their lives. It would be better to carry on a carnal relationship in secrecy than to try to change society to accommodate such an affair.

  Mamah put the minister’s letter into the cigar box along with the others. So this is how it is.

  Until last night Frank had revealed little of the conflict raging inside himself. He had shown such brave resolve in Berlin when the hideous scandal arrived in an envelope. He had been her loving protector when she might have destroyed herself. He’d been the one most insistent about pursuing a life together. She’d never seen him happier than he was here in Fiesole.

  What he had kept from her, though, was what she kept from him—the terrible weight of remorse and doubt that daily, hourly sometimes, shifted inside like cargo. Last night Frank had listed decisively to the side that would pull him back home to his family.

  Maybe designing a villa in Fiesole had been only an exercise for him. Why had she expected t
he dream to be any more than that, a fantasy, given the odds against it? Now he said he was going back to his children, not Catherine. But how could he sustain that resolve in the face of so much opposition?

  Mamah didn’t know if she could sustain it. If she returned right now, there was a good chance she would be sucked back into being Edwin Cheney’s wife. As much as she longed for her children, she knew if she got close to Oak Park, the work she had begun would be put aside.

  Ellen had told Mamah about a friend in Berlin who could secure a teaching position for her if she chose to stay in Europe. There was no hope of finding a job in the United States in the wake of the scandal, and she would need one now. She counted the months she had been gone. Fourteen since she boarded the train to Boulder. If she could stay on the continent ten more months, she could get a divorce from Edwin even if he didn’t want one. By then it would be two years since she’d lived under the same roof with him.

  Mamah would have to lean on Lizzie longer than she had expected. It was a lot to ask. Maybe she could manage to stay only until spring—another six months—but that might be enough.

  When Frank came into the garden that morning, he sat across from her. “What will you do?” he asked. The skin below his eyes was brown and puffy.

  “I’ve been thinking about that.” She looked out over the fog in the valley that was just beginning to burn off. “I’ve decided to stay over here, at least until spring.”

  Frank stirred milk into his coffee and avoided her eyes. “But you haven’t got a friend here.”

  “I’m going to ask Edwin to allow the children to come over. Louise could bring them.” She couldn’t keep her shoulders from sagging a little at the thought of the furor that idea would ignite back in Oak Park.

  Frank crossed his arms and confronted her gaze. “I told you from the start I would only stay over here for a year.”

  “I know that.”

  “Why don’t you come back, take an apartment in Chicago?”

  “Why don’t you say ‘I love you, Mamah.’?” Her voice quivered with anger. “Why don’t you say ‘Keep the faith. We will find a way.’? Why can’t you say that to me?”

  Frank swept the back of his hand gently across her cheek. “Of course I love you. You know what I want for us. But what can I promise? I am going back nearly broke to a place where I am despised. And the worst of it? I’m worried sick about leaving you here unprotected. How will you fend for yourself?”

  “Ellen says she knows people at a girls’ seminary school who will hire me to teach English.” Her infuriating frustration began to dissipate. “I’ll take more Swedish classes.” She tried to brighten her voice. “Once Ellen authorizes me to begin The Woman Movement, it has to come straight from the Swedish. I persuaded her I could do it, but it’s going to take total immersion.”

  Mamah could tell her bravado was not fooling him. “I dread being alone over here,” she admitted. “But the truth is, I’m not ready to face the yellow press. When I go back, I shall be stronger, for everyone concerned.”

  During breakfast they talked of their remaining weeks together. If they lived cheaply, they could make a quick tour through Austria and Germany, perhaps take up Wasmuth on his offer to arrange a meeting with the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt. On his way back to the States, Frank would stop in England to persuade his friend Ashbee to write an introduction to the volume of photographs Wasmuth was preparing. He would also take Mamah’s translations of The Morality of Woman and Love and Ethics back to his friend Ralph Seymour, to see if he’d publish them.

  He talked about his plans to divide up the house on Forest Avenue. He would renovate his studio into living quarters for Catherine and the children, then eventually, rent out the other half so they would have a regular income in addition to what he gave them. It would take time to lay the groundwork. But it wouldn’t be long before he and Mamah could have a home of their own together, maybe in the city.

  When Taylor knocked at the gate, Frank ushered him into the garden. Mamah greeted him, then stepped into the studio to fetch the rolled-up drawing of the villa. In the early-morning hours, she had covered it in the lily-patterned wrapping paper Frank had discarded the night before.

  “May I give this to you for safekeeping, Taylor?” she asked, putting it into his hands.

  He and Frank looked puzzled. “Of course,” Taylor said.

  “A little memento of our time here in Italy.” She smiled at his earnest face. “Proof that we all didn’t dream it. If you hold it for me, Taylor, then I know I’ll see you again.”

  CHAPTER 29

  October 28, 1910

  Ellen talks about living a “terrifyingly earnest life.” She says moral law is not written upon tablets of stone, but on tablets of flesh and blood. In one year I have traveled from Oak Park to Boulder, New York, Berlin, Paris, Leipzig, Florence, and back to Berlin. I’m tired. I don’t want to be anyone’s tablet of truth.

  Mamah set aside her journal and readied herself to go out. Bundled in her coat, she tiptoed down the hall past the closed door of Frau Boehm, past the parlor crammed full of heavy, dark furniture that reeked of polish, and through the front door of the Pension Gottschalk. On the street, she wrapped a scarf around her neck against the October chill, walked to the end of the block, then turned north toward the Wilmersdorf district police station. Anyone staying longer than two weeks in Berlin was required to register with the police. She was late getting to it, and annoyed now at having to give over perhaps an hour to waiting in line.

  “MAMA—” THE SERGEANT tripped on her first name as he read from her passport.

  “May-muh. It’s a difficult one, no matter what language,” she said.

  He didn’t look up. “May-muh Borthwick Cheney. Oak Park, Illinois. U.S.A.”

  “Yes.”

  “Father’s full name?”

  “Marcus S. Borthwick.”

  “Occupation?”

  “Do you mean my occupation?”

  The man looked up at her through smudged glasses. “No, his.”

  “Train repairman.”

  “His place of birth?”

  “New York.”

  The sergeant straightened in his seat and rotated his shoulders, then slumped down again, drew on his cigarette. “Are you married?”

  She swallowed. “Yes.”

  “Husband’s full name?”

  “Edwin H. Cheney.”

  “Occupation?”

  “President of an electric company.”

  “Birthplace?”

  “Mine?”

  “His.”

  Mamah felt her ears growing hot. “Illinois.”

  The man’s eyebrows rose above the spectacles. “Is he with you?”

  “No.”

  “Your religion?”

  “Why do you need to know that?”

  The man looked up and frowned. “It is the law, madam.”

  “Protestant.”

  “Number of times in Germany?”

  “Drei mal.” Three times.

  “Purpose of your visit?”

  “To translate sex manuals,” she muttered in English. “To drive housewives to mayhem.”

  “Eh?”

  “Um zu studieren.” To study.

  “How long will you stay?”

  “Three or four months.”

  He handed over her passport. “You are free to go.”

  Oh, Frank, where are you when I need you? She would have made him laugh, telling him about the pompous sergeant. But there wasn’t anyone with whom to share a real conversation. Frank had been back in Oak Park for a month and had his own struggles, far worse than hers. His one letter had been short and devastating. It’s official, my dear. Not a soul on my side. Friends cross the street rather than speak.

  Standing on the steps of the police station, Mamah felt her enthusiasm for her list of chores draining. It could all wait. She dropped her letters to Frank and Lizzie at the post office, then headed back to the boardinghouse.

&nb
sp; She had arrived at Pension Gottschalk thanks to Ellen, who knew the landlady. Frau Boehm was a well-heeled widow who gave generously to the Woman Movement. She was bighearted and bigheaded, with her hair rolled into heavy puffs over each ear, the sort of outspoken woman who might have been a colorful friend had their paths crossed back in Oak Park. But here in Berlin, there was a class distinction between landlady and boarder, especially since Mamah had chosen to rent a room on the top floor of the pension, the cheapest room in the house.

  She suspected she was one of the landlady’s causes, that the woman fancied she was “harboring” her. And while Mamah offered no details of her personal life, she guessed Frau Boehm had gotten her personal history from Ellen Key.

  At dinner the landlady sat at the end of the table, dressed in unfortunate copies of French gowns, with her great head floating like a dirigible above her shoulders. From time to time she paused midbite to pose discussion topics to her three female boarders. Is motherhood the right of every unmarried woman? Should girls be allowed to exercise naked at the gymnasiums? Mamah endured the dinners in silence. She had little money for food outside the fare that came with her room.

  Except for the enforced intimacy at the pension, Mamah felt invisible in Berlin. She was grateful for the anonymity. Neither the professor of Swedish at the university, nor the headmistress at the girls’ seminary where she taught, knew her full story. She’d passed herself off as an unmarried American scholar when she applied for the teaching position. That she was a foreigner was far less troubling than that she was a married woman living apart from her husband.

  When Frank left her in Berlin in September, Mamah had looked forward to the solitude ahead, because Ellen’s work required more than singleness of purpose. It required surrender. In Nancy, when she’d given herself over to Love and Marriage, she had come away from the book with her soul fed as it had never been fed before.

  If she could lead other women to experience the same intense recognition she’d felt, if she could manage to make Ellen Key comprehensible to American women, who knew what might happen? Maybe a revolution in the Woman Movement. To tease from Swedish into English the delicate shadings of phrase and argument would take every drop of concentration she could squeeze from herself. Solitude was a requirement. More than anything, she wanted to feel again the calm confidence she’d felt in Nancy.