by Nancy Horan
Mamah had told Josiah to make her identity clear to the mother who answered the phone. Miss Mamah Borthwick from over at the Wright place would be coming to pick up her sons if they could be spared for some planting work at Taliesin. Standing next to the telephone as he spoke, Mamah waited for a polite refusal.
“They’ll be ready for you at three o’clock,” Josiah said.
Mamah let out the breath trapped in her lungs. “Oh,” she said with some wonder. “Isn’t that grand?”
“GLAD TO MEET YOU.” A stocky woman younger than Mamah answered the front door, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’m Dorothea Barton. Come on in.” She led Mamah into a tiny parlor, where she handed over two mason jars of blackberry preserves with bows around their necks. “I’ve been meaning to get over to your place to welcome you.”
Mamah stood in the tiny parlor, struck dumb by the woman’s friendliness.
“Did the flu get you folks this winter?” the woman asked.
The press got us, Mamah wanted to say, but this woman was not like Mattie or Else or even Lizzie. “No, thank goodness.”
As Dorothea Barton went out into the yard and hallooed for her sons, Mamah glanced around the parlor. There were mismatched blue-patterned china dishes arranged on a rack above a sideboard. An ancient studio portrait of an old-time family. A battered organ with a fringed shawl thrown over it. A shiny black horsehair sofa. Above the organ, an embroidered hanging read, DILIGENCE IS THE MOTHER OF GOOD LUCK.
When Dorothea returned, she was followed by two gangly boys in their teens who announced themselves as Leo and Fred.
“Did you see my Emma when you came in?” The woman had a young girl by the hand. “Emma, tell Miz Borthwick how old you are.”
“Six.”
“You have a daughter about her age, don’t you?” Dorothea asked Mamah.
“I do.” She’s read about Martha and John, Mamah thought. “She will be here for the whole summer. I know she would love to meet you.”
Heading down the driveway of the farm, she saw that Dorothea Barton’s cutting garden was already sprouting flowers. Nearby, circle-patterned trellises braced luxurious grapevines. “Where did you get those supports?” she asked the boys.
“Pop makes ’em out of barrel hoops,” Leo said. “He can do a hundred things with a barrel.”
When she got home, she went looking for Frank. She called out to him, but he was nowhere nearby. She took off her coat and went back into her study. There she found her coffee tins and seedlings placed on the floor. For a moment she felt puzzled, and then she understood. Frank had taken them down from the window because of how they looked, she was sure of it. They cluttered the lines of the windows and had probably driven him mad for weeks.
It hurt her, almost like a slap on the hand, but she put the slight aside. It was warm enough now to harden off the seedlings. She gathered the cans onto a tray and carried them outside. She wouldn’t mention the barrel-hoop idea to Frank. He would think she had taken leave of her senses.
MAMAH CALLED THE Barton boys when the truck with the plants arrived the next day. Their father, Samuel, drove them over and got out of the car to have a look. He was a tall, emaciated man with a bottlebrush mustache.
“Rotted,” he said as the boys unloaded the perennials first. The chrysanthemums, physostegia, and coreopsis were all dead. Of the sixty phlox plants she’d ordered, only fourteen had survived the trip. Fraülein von Lassburg and General von Heutsze were among the corpses. All twenty rosebushes were dried out and useless.
“I can’t help you with those,” he said, “but if we work quick, we can save the berries and apple trees. How many men have you got here?”
There were Josiah, Billy Weston and his son, the Barton boys, and eventually, there would be Frank, who had gone to Madison for building supplies. Mamah went into the house and brought out the drawing of the whole property, with its tiny Xs showing how the trees would form grids diagonally down the hills. She didn’t mention the grid’s inspiration, how the trees in the Arno Valley below Fiesole had been marked off into squares by cypress trees. She knew better than to mention the undulating crops of Umbria or how the Japanese so artfully terraced their crops.
Samuel walked down the slope with Mamah beside him. He stood midhill with his hands in his back pockets. “Doing some big farming, are you?” he said.
With the truck fully unloaded, Mamah and the men stood in a forest of saplings. She was relieved when Frank appeared. He seemed glad to have a neighbor giving directions on how to plant the trees. Would Frank have known to prune them before they went into the ground, the way Samuel Barton was instructing everyone? In his feverish dreams of self-sufficiency for Taliesin, Frank had bitten off more than he could chew. He had not anticipated the Herculean job now at hand, but he would never admit it. He changed clothes and joined the men in the field.
For three days they planted. Mamah asked for help from Lil, who cooked two pot roasts for the men when they came in from the fields, while Mamah set about planting those things that had survived. When Dorothea Barton arrived with her family the morning of the second day, she and her sons began unloading boxes crammed full of plants she had dug up from her garden. “Sam said you lost some of yours, so here’s a few to plug in. The daisies are from the Wilkins’ garden. They’re the next farm past us. Oh, she has a garden. I’ll take you over there when it gets blooming.” The women worked beside each other, talking about gardens and children as they dug in the plants.
“Your sons are such fine young men, Dorothea,” Mamah said.
The woman looked up from her work, beaming. “Thank you,” she said.
At the end of the last day of planting, Dorothea and her little family toured the house. They took off their shoes at the door and walked through the house as if it were a peculiar cathedral. Dorothea seemed puzzled by Frank’s arrangements of mosses and rocks, and she called the Ming vase he had filled with willow branches “sweet.”
Samuel remained closemouthed until he reached the bedroom window. “She’s a beaut, all right,” he said, staring out at the view.
Mamah thought he was talking about the fields they had just planted. The little trees, laid out like black cross-stitches on a rustic quilt, were already charming and full of promise. How extraordinary it would be in six or seven years to look down upon them and see clouds of blooms.
When she saw the dampness in his eyes, though, she knew he was talking about his own farm. “I’ve never seen her look so pretty,” he said.
1913
CHAPTER 42
Taylor Woolley pulled a drawing from a cardboard tube and spread it out on the drafting table. He smoothed the edges, then set a pencil box on one corner and weighed down the others with things he found around the studio—a T square, a vase. Emil Brodelle, the young draftsman working at the other table, drifted over to have a look.
“‘Villa for an Artist,’” he said, reading aloud the label at the bottom. “I saw this in the portfolio.”
The three of them stood staring at the drawing.
“I see Taliesin in it,” Emil said. “The way it fits into the hill. The terraces, too.”
Mamah smiled at Taylor when they were alone. “You didn’t forget.”
“It was the first thing I packed.”
“I can smell the pines around Fiesole just looking at that drawing,” she said.
“Do you miss it?”
“Oh, I miss the time we had. But I love this place. Isn’t it funny? I hated the idea of Wisconsin, and now all I want to do is stay put.”
“Sink some roots?”
“Deep ones,” she said. “Since we’ve been back from Japan, I look around and see all kinds of things crying out for attention. My garden, for instance. I can’t tell you how good it feels to have a place that needs me.” She rolled up the drawing and put it back in the tube. “Come with me. I want to store this in the vault, and there are some other things to show you.”
She led him to the stone vault in
the studio where Frank kept his prize Japanese prints. “Pictures of the floating world,” Mamah said with a little flourish of her hand. Taylor stared, agog, as she opened one box after another. She showed him colorful pictures of Kabuki actors with drawn swords, geishas with parasols, views of snowy Mount Fuji.
“Mr. Wright has transformed himself into a print merchant,” she said.
“I always knew he was wild for the things, but—”
“More than wild. He will have to explain to you their meanings. Oh, how he loves to have a print party. We’ll have one tonight, just the three of us. And he’ll tell you all about every one of these. You’ll wish you hadn’t asked.”
“My stars, there must be a thousand of them.”
“And this is what’s left over. The bulk of them have been shipped off to Boston.”
“He mentioned some collectors.”
“Yes,” she said, closing the vault door. “The Spaulding brothers in Boston. They’re really the reason we could afford to be over there for so long. They gave Frank carte blanche to buy what he saw fit.” She didn’t tell him the dollar amount the brothers had turned over to Frank—twenty-five thousand. The figure would seem preposterous to a young man struggling to get by as an architect. Taylor had come to help Frank prepare drawings for an exhibit, and she was sure he wouldn’t be making much money during his stay.
“Do you want to take a walk around while we wait for Frank? His train gets in about an hour and a half from now.”
“I can’t think of anything better.”
“It was a stroke of luck,” Mamah said as they headed out to the gardens. “We were planning to go to Japan in January anyway, so Frank could talk to government people about the Imperial Hotel. You know that part of the story, right?”
“I heard he was under consideration. It’s a huge commission.”
“Well, it’s still up in the air, but we have very high hopes. It went well on that front. And it couldn’t come at a better time, if it comes.” She stopped walking for a moment and looked Taylor in the eyes. “I hate pretending with you. The truth is, Frank’s work has practically dried up. It seems there’s always something on the drafting table, but when it comes to getting a project built….” Taylor didn’t speak but took her elbow for a moment. He was a young man, Frank’s employee. She shouldn’t be talking to him about money.
“Anyway, these Spauldings got wind that Frank was traveling to Japan. He was going to look for prints anyway. You know him. But suddenly, there was money to spend on behalf of these brothers. It seems Frank is considered something of an expert on Japanese prints. And at ferreting them out.” She aimed an amused look at him over her spectacles.
“Quite an adventure you had?” Taylor had a knowing smile on his face. He’d been on a couple of Frank’s shopping sprees in Italy.
“I never knew what the next day would bring,” she said. “One moment we’d be chatting with a print seller in a perfectly dignified office over tea, and the next moment Frank would be disappearing down into smoky basements in the merchant’s quarters—‘go-downs,’ he calls them—where people had stockpiled the most amazing collections of ukiyo-e prints. Mind you, these weren’t the pristine pictures we found at the high end. But Frank doesn’t care if the edges are torn or if the prints are dirty. He is absolutely taken with the art and geometry of these things, which I suppose is what makes him so good at choosing them. He says they are more modern than Modernism.”
They sat down on the arc of stone around the tea circle.
“How has it been here?” Taylor might have been inquiring about the weather. Mamah knew he was asking about the press debacle.
“Did you hear about it out there?”
He nodded. “Only through a friend in Chicago. I didn’t read any of it myself. It wasn’t news in Salt Lake.”
Mamah sighed. “Thank you, Taylor.” She patted his hand. “People have been surprisingly generous. No one mentions it. Those who speak to us, that is.”
“And you? How are you?”
“I’m all right. Just trying to get my bearings since we returned.”
“Still translating?”
“Not at the moment. It’s too long a story.”
“And your children have visited?”
Mamah’s face broke into a broad smile. “They did. I had worried so much after all the publicity. But my daughter Martha instantly struck up a friendship with a girl named Emma from the next farm over, and she has a boy cousin who is my John’s age. It went better than I had expected. They ended up caring very much for Frank, I think, by the end of the summer. He took them riding and fishing and spoiled them, of course.
“We had so many visitors last summer. People would see the house from the highway and drive up the road out of curiosity. There were organized trips, too. We had a group of normal school students come with their teachers. And a Sunday school class. Can you believe it?”
“Interesting how people adapt with a little time.”
“Even people like me. This is my home now, Taylor.”
“What will you do if you have to go back to Japan?”
She shifted thoughtfully on the bench. “I’ll cross that bridge when I have to, I guess.”
They sat in the sun, soaking up the pleasure of the warm air and each other’s company. After a time Taylor went to the studio to settle in, and Mamah remained in the garden. It was the most perfect time of year in Wisconsin—the second week of May. When she and Frank had returned to Taliesin in April, she’d been thrilled to be home in time to see the first asparagus-like plugs of peonies rise out of the ground, and to smell the lilacs when they first popped open. Nearly all the fruit trees had survived and were leafing out. The house looked more beautiful than ever. Frank had brought home vases and screens and gorgeous silk kimonos that he arranged artfully throughout the rooms. The Far East melded into the American Middle West without a peep of protest. Mamah and Frank’s common history—the prairie house, Italy, Japan, even a bit of Germany—seemed to permeate every square inch of Taliesin.
Some of the harder parts about this place had not changed. Mamah couldn’t look out at the driveway without remembering the reporters coming up to the house. And Frank’s mother, who’d vacated her bedroom when they returned from Japan, now sulked around Jennie’s house when Mamah appeared, barely speaking to her. But Mamah had come back to Jennie as well, as sunny and kind a friend as she could hope for. She had also come back to the prospect of her children’s summer visit a few weeks away, and to a small circle of friends that was beginning to grow.
There was work to get back to if she decided to go forward with it. Frauenbewegung, The Woman Movement, was waiting. She’d done no translating for Ellen while in Japan. In fact, she had left the States truly upset with Ellen. She and Frank had been set to depart in early January for California, where their ship would embark for Japan. When word came that the Spaulding brothers wanted to see Frank before he sailed, a quick trip to the East Coast was arranged. The bulk of the week was spent in Boston, but at Mamah’s request, she and Frank traveled to New York to confront Mr. Huebsch, the man who was publishing the pirated translation of Love and Ethics. It was the principle of the thing that had pushed Mamah to get the conflict settled, but a practical matter as well. The audience for Love and Ethics was so small, there wasn’t room for two translations on the market. Huebsch’s version was almost certainly causing the slow sales of her own translation. Frank had encouraged her to confront him.
What a disappointment it had been to track Huebsch down only to have the man Mamah had so demonized produce a check from Ellen Key that proved she had not only authorized but paid him for his translation.
There was no use pretending now. Ellen had simply lied to her. But even more disconcerting was a remark by Heubsch’s fawning assistant, just as they were departing. “I mean no offense, Miss Borthwick,” said the ascetic-looking man whose pants were belted across his chest, “but I have an associate over at Putnam’s who says Ellen Key
prefers our translations of her work above all others. Putnam’s office in London feels the same way.”
“You pathetic worm,” Frank had shot back, his mouth nearly frothing. “You inconsequential—”
“We’ll go now,” Mamah said, pulling him along and out the door of the office.
They had caught the next train home, repacked quickly, and departed for California the next morning. Distraught, she took Heubsch’s translation of Love and Ethics and her own on the journey west. As it turned out, she had plenty of time to study them, since they missed their boat to Japan and had to remain an extra two weeks in California. She and Frank compared the two translations line by line during their wait. In some places she had to admit that Heubsch’s version was superior, while in other areas she felt she’d bested him. In the end, Mamah left the two translations on the writing desk of their hotel room and boarded the ship, intent on not thinking about Ellen Key for another six months.
And she had nearly managed. Every day on the ship was devoted to distracting Frank from his terrible seasickness. Once his feet hit the ground in Tokyo, though, he was immersed in meetings with government officials and, in his free moments, on the hunt for prints.
Frank had as his guide a remarkable man, Shugio Hiromichi, an Oxford-educated businessman with exquisite manners and connections to all levels of Japanese society, from highly placed officials to humble artisans. After a while Mamah stopped going along on the print hunts in the merchants’ quarters, especially at night. It made her uncomfortable to see Frank’s glassy gaze as he paused for a few words with Shugio on the steps of a go-down just before he went in, his heart clearly racing like a wolf’s outside a chicken coop. Mamah’s presence complicated the transactions, anyway. She was a woman, a well-dressed Westerner, who only gentrified the proceedings. “No bargains are going to be had in my presence,” she’d told the men after a few forays. “It’s best if you two go alone.”
