Loving Frank

by Nancy Horan

  In the kitchen, she was dismayed to find Gertrude crying.

  “I think we should leave,” Gertrude said, wiping her eyes with her apron. “Things don’t go so well.”

  “Are you homesick?” Mamah asked.

  “Yes. In Chicago things are better.”

  “Are you happy with the work you’re doing here?”

  “Yes,” Gertrude said. “That’s not a problem.”

  “Then why don’t you go back to Chicago next weekend? It’s not hard. Julian has gone back a couple of times, why shouldn’t you?” Mamah put her hand on Gertrude’s shoulder. “We think you’re doing a wonderful job. And we would love to have you stay.”

  The woman shrugged. “Thank you, madam.”

  THAT NIGHT, MAMAH climbed into bed with Martha. John had Lucky under the covers with him in his bed across the room.

  “Are you awake, John?” Mamah asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Martha?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I wanted to ask you something. Are you sometimes homesick when you’re here?”

  There was a long silence.

  “Uh-huh,” Martha said finally.

  “I know it must be hard for you to leave your friends every summer to come here.”

  John’s voice came through the darkness. “Don’t you ever get homesick for Oak Park?”

  The question caught her by surprise. She knew what he was asking. Don’t you ever miss us?

  “There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t miss you. And some days…well, I just wish for things that can’t be right now. But I carry both of you around in my heart all the time. It’s funny—it’s as if I have a little room inside where I can go, and there you are. And that makes me calm as can be.”

  No one spoke after that. The only sound in the room was the wheezing in and out of the dog’s breathing.

  CHAPTER 51

  “I keep wondering if Else has left.” Mamah spoke to Frank from a corner of the dining area, where she was scraping mud from Martha’s boots into a wastecan. Else had been on her mind since the Austrian prince’s assassination took over the headlines. Mamah scoured the Dodgeville Chronicle for the few dribbles of international news the paper might print, but she had to wait until Frank brought home the Chicago papers to catch up with the crisis in Europe. The papers he’d brought Friday night were full of news about women and children crowding Berlin’s train stations, trying to leave the country.

  “I had meant to write her and ask if I could put her in my book. You know, have her respond to some questions. Now…” Mamah brushed the boots, readying them for a coat of oil. “I keep thinking of all those young men who hung around the café, talking about art and philosophy. They’ve probably all been conscripted by now.” She shook her head. “Whenever I think of Else and her son, or Berlin, I find myself praying.”

  It was Tuesday morning, and Frank was eating a quick breakfast before he left for the train. He was headed back to Midway Gardens to finish it up, and was leaving behind Herb Fritz. Herb had expected a cool country sojourn when he came to work with Emil on the architecture exhibit for San Francisco. But it was unbearably humid in Wisconsin. When Mamah had gone to open her bureau this morning, she’d found the drawers stuck hopelessly shut.

  She walked out to see Frank off. “Take the kids to see the threshers,” he said, pecking her on the cheek.

  “Plan to.” She waved as he drove down the driveway and out to the highway through the fields. Men in giant threshing machines were expected momentarily at the homesteads around Taliesin; they were pushing their way across the countryside, farm by farm.

  Standing in the garden after he left, she could smell the rosemary she’d planted. A surprising number of flowers were thriving. She was drawn to motion around a bushy feverfew and walked over to have a look. White butterflies orbited crazily around it while a hundred bees dove in and out of the universe inside, collecting pollen. When she took off her spectacles to wipe the sweat from the bridge of her nose, the whole bush appeared to quiver with moving life.

  Usually at this time of year, she could barely look at her garden without thinking of work. In the ninety-degree humidity, some stems slumped over. There were asters and coneflowers to deadhead. The peony leaves were turning deep purple and needed to be removed.

  “David,” she called out when she saw the gardener. “I see some things that are begging to be cut back.” She pointed out the decaying foliage.

  “I’ll get on it.” David Lindblom wiped a sleeve over his face. “I need to talk to you about something, Mrs. Borthwick,” he said.

  “Surely.” She sat down on a bench in the shade and motioned to a chair nearby.

  “I don’t want Julian Carlton helping in the garden anymore,” David said. “He’s got a bad temper. I can’t work with the man.”

  She frowned. “What does he do?”

  “Says he only takes his orders from Mr. Wright. He gets mad when I ask him to do something.”

  “Did you speak to Mr. Wright about it?”

  “I was going to, but I missed him. I guess Emil’s had his problems with Carlton, too.”

  “When you see Julian, will you tell him to come and talk to me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  JULIAN’S FACE WAS covered in tiny beads of sweat when he appeared a few minutes later. He stood stiffly in front of her, as if at attention. He was spotless, as always, but there was something distressing in his demeanor. He seemed terrified.

  “They all pick on me. Emil has turned everyone against me. He has the men running to Mr. Wright with lies.”

  “That’s not true,” Mamah said. “Mr. Wright has never once mentioned it. But why do you argue with Emil and David?”

  “They order me around. Some of them call me George. I am a man. I don’t have to take that.”

  Mamah knew what it meant to a Pullman porter to be called George. It was an insult, though it was used all the time. It said, You don’t have a name.

  “Do I work for them, or do I work for Mr. Wright?”

  “You work for Mr. Wright and me, of course. But in the garden, you have to take David’s direction. And in the barn, Tom is the boss. You’ll have to find a way to make peace. We can’t have people getting into arguments all the time. I’ll speak to Emil.”

  A satisfied smile spread across Julian’s face. “Very good, madam,” he said.

  ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON, Mamah went out to the barn with the children to look at the foal. They were crouched down, as usual, in the dark aisle between the rows of stalls, looking through the gate to where the foal was. What sounded like mayhem broke out at the end of the aisle.

  “Saddle it!” It was Emil’s voice. In the dimness, she saw him standing next to a horse. On the other side of the animal, she could see only Julian’s legs.

  “I don’t work for you, white man.” Julian’s voice quaked with rage.

  “I said saddle it, you black son of a bitch!”

  “I’ll saddle it,” Julian cried out. “I’ll send you and your goddamn horse straight to hell.”

  Mamah held her breath, certain the two men would start punching each other. Martha leaned in to her side, covering her ears. When Julian turned and ran out, Mamah gathered up the children as Emil mounted his horse and rode away.

  In the studio later, Mamah found Emil worked into a lather, recounting for Herb what had happened in the barn.

  “He’s not right in the head,” Emil told her. “Blows up at the smallest thing. Threatens people. David has been afraid of him since the day he came.”

  “I just talked to David not a day ago. He didn’t say he was afraid of him.”

  “Before I ever met Carlton, David told me to stay out of his way. Said he was an angry, hotheaded devil. Well”—Emil inhaled deeply—“that he is.”

  Out in the courtyard, Billy Weston confirmed it. “He’s smart and acts polite, but he’s got a desperate streak. He can’t get along with any of the other men.”

  Ma
mah went to her bedroom and sat down at her writing desk to gather her thoughts. It took her only a moment to reach a decision. She would have to let the Carltons go.

  The whole situation was a pity. Gertrude was as fine a cook as any Mamah had ever come across, and a lovely person on top of it. Even Julian was an ideal servant. He’d seemed so good-natured before all this. He’d been here only a few weeks, though, hardly long enough to really know a person. There was an angry part of Julian that he obviously hadn’t shown the Vogelsangs when he’d worked for them. She had no illusions about changing his personality.

  Still, it could not have been easy for Gertrude and Julian to come into a situation with so many personalities to adjust to. Mamah remembered her own first months at Taliesin. What must it be like to be a complete outsider, and a colored man to boot, among these fellows? She chided herself for being so naive as to think a dozen people could live together without repercussions. It was darn near miraculous that there hadn’t been trouble before now.

  Makeshift as it was, Taliesin was a real community. There were strong ties among the men. To her, they were family. She knew about their fiancées and wives and children, their worries. A few of them had been here during the worst of the scandal. She would never forget how they had stepped forward to protect her and Frank when the posse of vigilantes was supposedly on its way.

  If there was cruelty among them, Mamah never saw it, and she thought she saw them pretty clearly for who they were. It had taken time, but the men had enfolded her into their society. They accepted her as the boss when Frank was away. Only yesterday Emil had approached her with a design question, and Billy with a construction decision. She had managed to give both of them direction. She grew more confident by the day about running the farm. “Nice work,” Frank had said the few times she’d made decisions in his absence.

  Still, she wished he were here now.

  After dinner Mamah called Julian into the kitchen, where Gertrude was cleaning dishes.

  “I’m not putting all the blame on you for the trouble we’ve had here, Julian,” she said. “Your work, and Gertrude’s, has been very good. But you seem to have too many personal differences with the rest of the men. It may look big, but this is really a small place, and when people don’t get along, we all feel the strain. I’m sorry, but I think it’s best if you and Gertrude go back to Chicago.”

  Julian’s voice trembled as if he were about to cry. “Does Mr. Wright know this?”

  “I speak for Mr. Wright,” she said. “When you finish the week Saturday night, it will be the end of your stay here. Someone will drive you to Spring Green on Sunday to catch the train.”

  Gertrude had kept her head down as Mamah spoke. Now she glanced fearfully at Julian. In that one look, Mamah saw a whole relationship. She didn’t doubt that Julian bore down hard on Gertrude.

  “Very well,” he said finally.

  Mamah touched Gertrude’s arm before turning and leaving the kitchen.

  THAT NIGHT SHE COULDN’T fall asleep. She went into the children’s bedroom and cuddled next to Martha’s damp little body. Mamah had always slept deeply here in the country. Now she heard the hot breeze stir the oak outside the bedroom. The trees roused themselves intermittently to rustle leaves, then fell back into a torpor.

  She stayed awake listening to the high, sustained trills of frogs and insects. For a few minutes, she was a girl in a thin cotton nightgown again, splayed out on her bed, trying not to move in the stifling humidity. She took all of the sounds for granted, back then. As a child, she had never bothered to ask what insects made which part of the nighttime racket. The sounds seemed to her now the very essence of her early summers. She thought of the houses on her block when she was a girl. Voices from the dark porches. Families sitting on steps, speaking low, laughing. The certainty of it all.

  Mamah stroked wet strands of hair off Martha’s forehead. How charmed a childhood I was given, she thought. As she began to drift off, it occurred to her that it was time to start French lessons for Martha. She made a mental note to find a tutor in Oak Park for the fall.

  FRIDAY PASSED WITHOUT any fights. At lunchtime Julian served the men in the dining room, and there appeared no rancor between them.

  Saturday, Gertrude knocked on Mamah’s bedroom door at eight in the morning. She wore the same worried look she had two days earlier. “You have a phone call, ma’am,” she said.

  “The threshermen are here!” Dorothea Barton’s voice was girlish on the other end of the line. “Are you coming over?”

  “We wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Can you hold off until after lunch? The men want to get everything running.”

  “Around one o’clock?”

  “That’s perfect. Now, say, I hope you’ll stay on for dinner. We always have a little celebration. Sam plays his fiddle, and people dance. You know how our living room floor kinda dips down in one corner? By the end of the night, we’re all bunched up in that spot. Oh, but it’s a hoot.”

  “What can we bring?”

  “Yourselves. And we wouldn’t turn away one of Gertrude’s cakes.”

  Mamah glanced over at the scowling cook, who was frying bacon. “I can’t promise it, but we’ll see.” After she hung up, she considered speaking to Gertrude, then walked instead into the dining room, where Julian was putting out plates for breakfast.

  “Good morning,” she said to him.

  “Good morning.” His aspect had changed from the weepiness of two days before. Julian was her height, and he gazed into her face with an arrogant coolness. He had on the white jacket he always wore to serve, and then she noticed what else. He was wearing a pair of Frank’s linen trousers.

  Mamah walked outside into the courtyard, trying to calm herself. She circled the house, looking for the men, but could not find any of them. Were they out in the fields helping? She went back inside and called into the kitchen, “The children and I won’t be here for breakfast.” Then she hurried into the bedroom to change clothes and awaken Martha and John.

  In minutes she and the children were out the door with biscuits and bacon Gertrude had wrapped for them in a napkin. Mamah felt better the minute they were away from the house.

  “Why is Gertrude angry, Mama?” John asked when they were in the car. The cook had not responded to the boy’s morning hello.

  “She and Julian are leaving, honey. They haven’t worked out. Julian seems to fight with everyone.”

  “Oh.”

  “Are you sad to see them leave?” Mamah asked.

  “Her, yes. Him, no,” John said.

  “Where are we going?” Martha asked.

  “We aren’t invited to the Bartons’ until one. So I thought we’d go fishing in a new spot.”

  They ate breakfast on a sandy stretch along the river, then set to digging for worms. When the children had a supply, Mamah sat down on the blanket near a patch of Queen Anne’s lace. She yanked off one of the pods and worked at peeling it open.

  It was possible Frank had given Julian those pants. Unlikely, though, since they were part of the suit he’d had tailored in Italy. No, it was more likely that Julian had gone into Frank’s closet and helped himself. There was an awful sense of violation in that notion. She didn’t want to picture Julian creeping around their bedroom while they were out of the house. But she suspected that was what had happened.

  Around eleven-thirty, they piled back into the car and left a dusty cloud behind them as they bumped over the rutted road toward Taliesin. Ahead, heat shimmered in waves; red-winged blackbirds started up from cattails as the car approached. When they passed the Bartons’ house, the sound of the steam engine was deafening. The smell of the breeze had changed from cow manure to diesel fuel. Why had she found threshing time so captivating last summer? True, it was a time for neighbors to gather and help one another. Now, though, it seemed noisy and dirty. In the field, the engine sent a black plume of smoke snaking up, and spreading out to smudge the sky. She didn’t want John or Martha near the
thresher—you could lose a limb in a blink. She would have to be on alert all afternoon to keep them at a distance.

  When Mamah walked into the house, she sought Julian out. He was setting the table in the worker’s temporary dining room near her office. He turned a baleful stare toward her when she spoke.

  “Julian, I’ve thought it over,” she said. “I believe it would be fine for you to leave today. We will pay you for the full week. You and Gertrude can pack up after lunch.”

  “We will finish up properly,” he said matter-of-factly. “We plan to go to the church in Milwaukee tomorrow morning, then take the train on to Chicago afterward. We will go to Gertrude’s sister.”

  “I see,” she said.

  The thought of spending one more night in the same house with Julian frightened her. If she couldn’t get rid of him, Frank could.

  Mamah walked to the kitchen and found it blessedly empty of Gertrude. She picked up the telephone receiver.

  “Selma,” she said when the operator finally came on. “I want you to connect me to the telegraph office.”

  There were clicks on the line, and a man answered.

  “Charley, it’s Mamah Borthwick out at Taliesin. I need to get a message to Frank immediately. He’s at Midway Gardens in Chicago.”

  “Righty-o. What do you want to say?” he asked.

  “Say, ‘Come as quickly as you can. You are needed at Taliesin immediately.’”

  “All right, Mrs. Borthwick.” His voice grew sober. “Is there some way I can help?”

  “No, no,” said Mamah distractedly. Perhaps she was overstating the situation. She considered rewording it. “Just some strange doings. I have a houseful of men here. We’re safe. But wire him right now, will you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and hung up.

  Frank would have the telegram by two, she thought, and would be home late that night if he took a train in the afternoon.