by Nancy Horan
“What has Harriet Monroe ever done to you?” Mamah asked.
“She wrote a nasty review in the Tribune.”
“You didn’t mention it. When?”
“Four years ago.” Frank was creeping toward a cabinet speckled with flies. “William Drummond!” he muttered. Smack. “Elmslie. Purcell.” Smack. Smack. He knocked over a chair while dispatching the last two flies, named for former draftsmen she’d heard him mention in moments of despair—men he once trusted who now copied his work.
“I’m going into town.”
Frank stopped his swatting. “What prompts your recklessness, my dear?”
“Your mother. I’m going to take Lil the five dollars we owe her, and hopefully talk her into coming back, because I really don’t want to do this cooking job by myself.”
Frank put down the swatter and walked over to her. He stood behind Mamah and rubbed her shoulders. “She lives above the general store,” he said, kissing her ear. “Will you get a couple of other things?”
“Give me a list and some money.”
Frank scribbled down a few items on a scrap of paper. He reached into his right pocket and pulled out its contents in handfuls. Crumpled together were dollar bills, envelopes, old uncashed checks, a couple of pencils, and an eraser. He flattened out four five-dollar bills. “Is this enough?”
“It should be. I’ll buy some groceries, too.”
Mamah put on her sun hat and climbed into the car. It was the autumn equinox and still blazing hot. Black flies swirled outside as the workmen began to arrive at the house.
“CAN YOU TELL ME how I can find Lil Sullivan?” Mamah asked. She was standing in front of the fabric counter when the owner appeared.
“Just go around back and climb up the steps,” he said. “She should be there.”
When Lil answered the door, she was wearing a rumpled robe. Somewhere in the background, a child was crying. She looked stunned to find Mamah standing there.
“I want to apologize to you. I should have gotten here sooner to give you this money, but…Well, here it is.” Mamah handed her the five.
“Thank you.”
“You shouldn’t have been treated the way you were that day. I should have spoken up, and I haven’t forgiven myself for not doing it. I was thinking, Lil, if you came back—if you were willing to come back—I would do my best to keep her out of the kitchen. I will speak to Mr. Wright about it, and we will find a way.”
“Who is that?” A man’s voice came from somewhere inside the apartment.
“I can come back,” Lil said. “Is tomorrow all right?”
“Tomorrow is wonderful. Tomorrow is perfect. Thank you.”
Mamah felt so elated, she nearly forgot to stop downstairs to buy supplies. She waited her turn behind a couple of farmers who were discreet enough not to stare at a new face in the store. When it was her turn, she handed over the list Frank had scribbled—so many pounds of black galvanized nails, lengths of pipe, and other jottings the nature of which she couldn’t interpret. The man went in the back and returned with the supplies.
“Do you have an account with us, ma’am?” He was a big man with deep, vertical furrows in his long face.
“We do.” The store was now blessedly empty. “It’s the account of Frank Lloyd Wright.” She held her breath and looked at the man straight on. If he had heard about “the woman” out at Taliesin living with Frank, he did not betray it. He turned his back to her, bent down to get out his account book, opened it, then pointed to a page titled WRIGHT, F.
“Mr. Wright owes money on his account,” he said. His attitude cooled. “He paid half of his balance in June and has not paid the rest since. He owes fifty-eight dollars.”
Mamah’s eyes began to burn. “I’ll just get the supplies another day,” she said. She took out the remaining fifteen dollars Frank had given her, added to the money the few dollars of her own she was carrying, and handed them over to the man. “We shall get the other forty to you promptly,” she said. She walked out of the store and kept her head bent as she climbed into the car.
Behind the steering wheel, Mamah slowly drove out of town. When she got to the county road, she pressed the pedal to the floor and constructed one withering sentence after another to deliver to Frank when she got home.
As she pulled into the driveway, she saw him and the workmen crouched around something, probably plans. When she got closer, she saw that they were circled around an array of eggs, standing, every last one of them, on end.
“Mamah!” Frank called out when he saw her. “You’re just in time. This only lasts for a short while.”
The carpenters and plasterers stood around the eggs with grins on their faces, feeling a little silly, perhaps, but clearly delighted by Frank’s artful spin on the old equinox trick. For he had taken the time to decorate every egg in its own complex geometrical pattern with colored pencils. The results were dazzling; the eggs looked like brilliant, faceted jewels.
“How often is the world in perfect balance, gentlemen?” Frank said. “Enjoy it.”
“I don’t believe you!” she said when she had him alone. “To experience that kind of humiliation and then to come home…” She threw up her arms in exasperation. “What were you thinking, sending me to the general store when you knew you owed them money?”
Frank shrugged. “Look, help me. I’m terrible at the business part of this thing.”
“I won’t live this way, Frank. You have to pay your bills. The whole bill. Every bill. Or just pay cash.”
“I do. Often.”
“And if you can’t afford it, then don’t buy it.”
“We have to get this place closed in before winter,” he said. “I need the supplies, and I need them now.”
“I would rather freeze than buy things on credit.”
“Look, if you’re willing to, you can take over the bill paying.” He was scratching his back against the door frame.
“Will you sit down, please, and talk to me?”
He sank into a chair.
“Frank, this is no way to start things up here, I’m telling you. There are people who want us to fail.”
“I know,” he said, “I know.”
She pulled a chair up and sat with her knees nearly touching his. “Let’s not give them the satisfaction. What do you say?”
He lowered his eyes.
“And something else.”
Frank shifted in his chair, as if he knew he would be held there for a while.
“Lil is coming back.”
“Congratulations. How did you do that?”
“I told her your mother would not be coming into the kitchen.”
He bent his head and put a thumb and forefinger over his closed eyes. “Shall I put Mother in charge of cow roping?” He sighed when he looked up. “Or hay stacking?”
“I’m serious. Would you arrange for her to keep away from Lil?”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“I’m not done.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said boyishly.
“Frank.” She hesitated. “What year were you born?”
“Ah, Mamah.” Frank fell against the back of the chair he was sitting on and threw up his hands in a “caught me” gesture. “1867.” There was some defiance in his voice.
“You told me you were born the same year I was, 1869.”
“And there it is,” he said.
“What do you mean, ‘And there it is’?”
“I was a man in love. What can I say? It was a soul confession. I thought that finding you was damn near miraculous. Still think so. It didn’t seem such a big…”
“Lie?”
“I just said it. I didn’t think about it before it came out, and you seemed so happy about it. I felt that even though it wasn’t precisely true, it should be true.”
So odd an untruth, she thought when she was alone. About something so inconsequential. Yet it wasn’t the first time she had caught him in a lie or distortion. He romanticized t
hings. He couldn’t resist enlarging his clients into heroes and heroines, making them gallant figures in his own King Arthur–size imagination. Today, out in the courtyard, he had been Merlin, dazzling the men with a show of magic. He loved imbuing everything with a little drama. It made life so much more interesting.
It was hard to get angry with Frank Wright. Somehow she would have to find a way to make him understand that there was no need to exaggerate anything. That he was extraordinary enough already.
CHAPTER 37
October 28, 1911
Frank presented me with bad news last night. He showed me an article about us that ran in the Chicago Examiner in early September. It was lurid—“love nest” and Catherine “left in the lurch” and all that. That no other newspapers jumped on board to make it a full-blown scandal is miraculous, I guess. In this case, I don’t begrudge Frank for keeping the whole thing from me until now. It’s not so awful to receive one’s bad news late, when the time for the other shoe to drop is well past. Lizzie, if she knew of it, made no mention to me.
On we go. Wasmuth has finally sent the monograph to Frank’s Chicago office. It has only sold a few copies in the U.S., but Frank is relieved and optimistic. Taliesin marks our new beginning. The monograph marks a new start for Frank’s career. No time to toast milestones. Too busy.
It weighs heavily on me daily that I have written but one letter to Ellen since I came to Taliesin. That I have been too burdened with the house to even think of writing seems a poor excuse. Thank goodness I have good news to deliver to her now— Love and Ethics is nearly published. Ellen doesn’t understand how provincial people are here in the States. She doesn’t fully comprehend why Frank had to put up the money for Ralph Seymour to print Love and Ethics and The Morality of Woman. I have tried to explain kindly that no other publisher would touch either of them. I am reluctant to tell her how badly I was treated at Putnam’s last summer when I stopped over in New York. They wanted no part of my proposal to publish her “personal freedom” essays. Their excuse was that their London office does all of her English translating. Obviously, she hasn’t told them I will translate for the American audience. In truth, though, I could smell something else in their lack of interest—fear. Too controversial.
Last week in the mail I received a disturbing letter from a man in New York named Huebsch who insists Ellen Key gave him exclusive rights to publish Love and Ethics in America. How very strange. Who knew that the translating business was as low-down as bootlegging? One makes so little money from it, it seems hardly worth the effort to steal.
Frank has begun building a dam to create a source of power here on the property. He says we will also have a pond for waterfowl. Taliesin is taking shape. Soon I shall have my own study!
Frank rose at dawn that morning, as he always did. He went outside to bring in wood while the sky was still a pink ceiling over the pale horizon. The furnace was not functioning yet—some parts of the behemoth were still missing—and Mamah didn’t think Frank cared a whit. He loved getting the stove and fireplaces roaring. She stayed in bed until she felt guilty, then stuck a foot out to test the air. Freezing. In a little while he would bring her the socks and dress and wool underwear she’d set out the night before. For the past week, he had been warming her clothes by the fire. When he brought them in to her, she would leap up, dance around the cold floor as she dressed, then go put the percolator on the stove.
Around eight-thirty, as he departed for the train to the city, she watched him move down the road. When his car passed a ditch full of cattails, it startled a flock of sandhill cranes. They flew up crying, straightened their long necks and beaks into perfect arrows, then turned southward, along with Frank.
Intent on settling in completely while Frank was gone, Mamah went to the shed to bring her remaining belongings into the house. She took a candle into the dark little building, pushing the door wide to get what daylight she could. Mamah moaned when the candlelight revealed the chaos inside. Shreds of paper and fabric lay around the chewed-up boxes where animals had been devouring their contents.
She sank to her knees to go through what was left of a box of old photographs. Raccoons, judging by the scat on the floor, had chewed the corners off of the pictures. She could save them, she thought, by trimming and reframing them, but as she sorted through the contents, her heart sank. She found a twenty-year-old family portrait shredded beyond repair, the legs of her parents and sisters chewed off.
Mamah felt ill as she carried the remains of her possessions into the house. She didn’t care so much for her clothes, but she ached over the loss of the portrait. And she was terrified to open the box with the half-finished translations in it.
Ten months had elapsed since Frank had appeared in Berlin, so full of hope and plans for their future in Wisconsin. At the time she had pictured herself as happy as a queen, translating at her own desk in a room with a vast view of the hills—an image she might have captioned THE VOICE FOR ELLEN KEY IN AMERICA, AT WORK. Now, when she opened the box containing the manuscripts, she was elated simply to find that they had not been eaten.
THE CLOSE CALL shook Mamah. She resolved to return to translating at once, and sat down to write Ellen Key the letter she’d already composed in her head. She promised to send some essays to The American magazine, where they could be read by the general public, and she included the strange Huebsch letter. At the end Mamah assured Ellen she was back to work again.
She was just folding up the letter when one of the workmen knocked at the end of the hallway to get her attention. “Mrs. Borthwick?” someone called out. The men had begun to call her that name, at her own request, but it still sounded strange to her.
“Josiah’s come back today,” It was Billy’s voice. “Do you want to talk with him, or should I?”
“I will,” Mamah said. “Tell him to meet me in the living room.”
Josiah was a young carpenter’s apprentice who had revealed, during his brief employment with them, a considerable talent and a weakness for drink. In August and September, he had failed to show up on the occasional Monday. But by the end of October, he was missing two in five workdays, yesterday being the latest.
Josiah was small and wiry, a handsome boy with white-blond hair and a shy manner. He held his hat in his hands, his head bent as his contrite gray eyes peered up at her under the bushy blond eyebrows.
“We missed you sorely yesterday, Josiah.”
“I’m sorry about that, ma’am,” he said. “I was awful sick. Musta laid into something spoilt.”
Mamah studied the young man’s red face. Beneath one eye, the skin was swollen and yellow-green—suggestive of another barroom brawl. She hated the prospect of Frank having to fire him, if it came to that.
“Well, Josiah, the truth is, we need you desperately here. You’re one of the best carpenter’s apprentices Mr. Wright has had the pleasure of working with.”
The young man hung his head. “I’ll do better.”
“I know you will. I’m sure of it.”
The exchange left Mamah feeling enervated. It occurred to her that if she were to keep Ellen’s faith in her, she would have to find a way to separate from the day-to-day decisions and chores at Taliesin. The crews had shrunk enough for Lil to handle the food preparation by herself. It wouldn’t be premature to withdraw a bit now.
Taliesin had come a long way since Mamah had arrived that first August day. There were windows in—large clear panes, with no stained glass because there was no need to block out the views. There was plaster on the walls. Rough-cut oak beams thrust out from interior walls of stacked limestone.
How different from the house on East Avenue, she thought. In Oak Park, the kind of building Frank had put up, despite being called a “prairie house,” turned inward toward the hearth and family life and turned its back on the street, because there was no real prairie beyond the door, only other houses.
Here, Taliesin opened its arms to what was outside—the sun and sky and green hills and
black earth. Far more than the house on East Avenue, this house promised good times. It was truly for her, with its terraces and courtyard and gardens so like the Italian villas she had loved. Yet it wasn’t an Italian villa. It had elements of the prairie house but it was not one. Taliesin was original, unlike anything else she had ever been in—a truly organic house that was of the hill.
Most astounding to Mamah was the space within; it was a dimension unto itself. What could be more expressive of the American ideal than a home where a person could feel sheltered and free at the same time? She loved sitting near the fireplace and looking out through the spacious living room to the fields and sky beyond. It was as if there were no walls to limit her view or thoughts or spirit as they expanded out and out. This was the “democratic architecture” Frank had been straining to achieve since she’d known him. Often she had heard him say that the reality of a building is the space within. And what you put into that space will affect how you live in it and what you become. Here at Taliesin he didn’t want to clutter the place with stuff that did not ennoble them. She felt the same.
Mamah could picture Frank when he came to this hill with the idea of Taliesin brewing in his mind. Unrestrained by a suburban lot, he was free here to scoop up the sun and breezes and views. She could see him standing with his nose in the air, sniffing like a bird dog, taking in the place the way he often did when an idea began to form in his mind. Pretty soon the squares and rectangles, the circles and triangles, would be arranging and rearranging themselves in his mind. This could go on for weeks before pencil touched paper. When it did, he might sketch furiously for only an hour before a brilliant design appeared. How often she had heard him say with a bit of bravado, “I shook it out of my sleeve,” as if it were the easiest thing, when in reality the design had been stewing for weeks inside his head. Other times he would take out his compass and T square and play on paper for long hours, designing and revising an idea, just as he’d done as a boy with his Froebel blocks.
