by Nancy Horan
He pictures himself standing up. He says out loud, “Get up,” and then he does it. In the bedroom he finds a clean shirt, socks, and underwear laid out for him on the counterpane.
Edwin is sitting at the table in the kitchen, his face ten years older than it was yesterday. Jennie’s husband, Andrew, sits quietly with him, along with their son, Frankie, who looks up from his cereal bowl wide-eyed. Jennie was in Madison when the fire broke out. She is asleep now, having worked through the night tending the injured.
Edwin has already announced that he will carry his children back to Oak Park for burial once a casket is built to contain what remains of them.
“We could have a service for Mamah here in the house,” Andrew ventures.
“No,” Frank says. “I will bury her today.”
He does not say aloud in front of Edwin what he thinks, that the idea of an undertaker or a traditional wake strikes him as unholy. He wants no false words from some stranger. There was not a false bone in her body. She would want it simple.
“Frankie and I will go into town and get some wood for the caskets,” Andrew says. “What do you want?”
“Pine,” Frank says. “Clean white pine.”
Edwin nods.
WORKMEN AT THE SITE are still dousing the rubble with water when Frank arrives. The morning sun comes and goes behind clouds.
These men who have laid brick for him, and carried sand from the river to stucco his walls, come forward now to express their sympathy. They, too, are grieving for their close friends who were lost or injured and for her, whom they had come to respect. They were all here yesterday fighting the fire. They’re tired and haunted-looking, and they want to make sense of what happened. They stand in a loose circle, their hands in their pockets. One of them says out loud what they are all wondering: How is it possible that one man could overpower seven people, four of them strong men, and burn down a house?
Danny Murphy, a carpenter, talked to Herb Fritz and Billy Weston before the two were carried off to a hospital. He has been trying to put together what pieces he knows. “The men was having lunch in their dining room,” he says to the others. “Miz Borthwick and the children was on the porch off the sitting room. Carlton seats and serves everybody like he always does, then he goes to Billy and asks can he clean some carpets. Billy don’t suspect nothin’. He says all right.” Danny sighs. “That’s why the men didn’t worry when they smelled the gasoline.”
He continues reconstructing what happened. Julian went around the house and locked everything shut, except for a window in the workmen’s dining room. Then he went and poured gasoline around the outside walls of the wing where Mamah and her children sat. He lit a match, raced onto the porch, and killed Mamah first with the ax, then John. Martha ran away while he was dousing her mother and brother with gasoline.
Danny is sure it went that way. “He caught up with the little girl. It wasn’t just the fire that got her,” he says softly, “on account of the three ax marks above her ear. How she lived on for those hours…” He shakes his head.
Frank is close to vomiting. He is relieved that Edwin has gone off somewhere.
“Then the bastard comes over to where the men was and sets that wing afire. One after another, they come out that door and window, and he got ’em. It was a shingling ax he had, and Billy said his strength was more’n three men’s. Tom Brunker was right ahead of Billy when he finally busted down the door. Julian just stove in Tom’s head…” He stops here, a whimper wheezing from a deep place. “By luck”—he shakes his head—“by God’s luck, Billy stumbled when he come runnin’ out, so the devil hit him, but he ain’t dead, is the main thing. Outside, he finds David all cut up but on his feet still, and they run together over to the next farm. Then I guess David just…” He shakes his head sadly and wipes a tear. “He just fell down. Couldn’t go no more.”
Another of the workmen picks up the story. He tells with awe how Billy Weston came upon his son, Ernest, dead in the courtyard. “Billy was howling and crying, Herb said. And then you know what he did? He got the hose and fought that fire alone until people came.”
There is silence for a while before the men puzzle out loud over Gertrude. She was found yesterday in her best Sunday clothes, walking down the highway. “She told the sheriff that Julian was sleeping with his ax on his pillow for three nights before he snapped. Said she was scared to death of him.”
“But why was she dressed like she knew ahead of time what he was going to do?” someone asks. “She could of stopped it all.” They’re glad she’s in jail with Carlton.
They shake their heads and talk of why it happened. Because Mamah fired Julian. Because he thought people picked on him. Frank’s mind is troubled by his own questions. He wonders how one man can be transformed over three days from a mild-mannered servant to an assassin. He wonders if the unstable man was set off by some preacher at his church sermonizing about wickedness, about people living in sin. Did he believe, in his madness, that it was a righteous slaughter he was about to carry out as he locked the doors?
“He was insane,” Frank says to himself aloud. The men turn to him, surprised by his voice suddenly entered in the conversation.
Danny concurs. “Before he died, David told Billy that the night before, Carlton come into the gardener’s shack with a big butcher knife, talkin’ crazy.”
If only David had told Billy about the knife. If only Gertrude had come forward and told someone about the ax. The men scuff the ashen muck with their boots, working and reworking the possibilities, thinking of the ways by which the thing might have turned out differently.
“What use is it?” Frank mutters.
The men stop then. One asks, “Can we start to cleaning up, Mr. Wright?”
“No,” he says. “Don’t touch anything. Not yet.”
Edwin appears, walking over a hill toward them. When he reaches the house, he asks where the porch was that his son and daughter had been sitting on when the fire started. Frank shows him the area, now just a sunken hole, where small plumes of smoke still rise.
Frank steps away, out of respect, as Edwin begins digging through the rubble.
BY THE EARLY AFTERNOON, Edwin has carried his son’s bones back to Jennie’s house. When Andrew returns with the wood, the men begin constructing the pine boxes. Frank looks down and sees that he is wearing boots that are not his own. He has no recollection of putting them on. Under his feet, there is still blood on the limestone terrace.
He walks through the rubble, searching. Here and there, small shards of pottery glint in the sun like shells on a beach. He gathers up what is still recognizable, though nothing is in one piece, not even the things that were rescued. His piano was thrown out a door and has no legs. Someone has put it in his studio and propped it up with wood blocks. A few salvaged chairs have landed there, too, and a couple of blackened metal urns from China. Only thirty of the 500 copies of his monograph stored in the basement were saved. All the rest—just gone. Even the children’s dog has vanished into thin air—incinerated, he assumes, like everything else.
Frank searches through the afternoon while Danny Murphy hammers in the background. He finds a thumb-size chunk of diary with fragments of words in Mamah’s elegant handwriting…. so glad that…He looks for a complete thought and finds only fragments. I love the idea of it… What idea did she love? What prospect was she contemplating so happily when she wrote those words?
Someone brings him a box, and he fills it with the pieces he finds.
HOURS PASS. Frank is brought food that he does not eat. Uncle Enos appears during the afternoon to tell him it’s all right to bury Mamah in the family plot near the Lloyd Jones chapel. Frank looks at old Enos, as wrinkled and hoary as his grandfather was right before his death. He thinks of the generations who made these hills sacred family ground. It is an act of loving generosity for the clannish old man to allow a stranger into the family churchyard.
“Thank you,” Frank says.
He watches a
s Danny and the others finish the two pine boxes, one for her, one for the children. When they are done, he and his son John ride back to Tan-Y-Deri in a truck and stand outside while the men take the small box to the parlor. A car is waiting to ferry Edwin and the remains of his children to Spring Green.
Edwin emerges from the house, dressed in the suit he wore yesterday, his eyes swollen and red. They all wait together silently until the little coffin is loaded into the automobile. Then he turns to Frank and extends his hand. Frank grasps it with both of his. The two men stand together in this way for a long moment. Frank wants to say, They were wonderful children. I loved them, too. But such words coming from his mouth would be profane to the other man’s ears.
“Goodbye, Frank,” Edwin says finally.
“Goodbye, Ed.”
They look into each other’s eyes once more, and then he is gone.
WHEN THE WORKMEN carry the larger pine box into Jennie’s house, Frank and John follow them. Father and son gently lift Mamah’s charred and battered body into it.
“Meet me back at the house,” Frank tells John.
He returns on foot to Taliesin, sick and shaking, trying to pull himself together. He doesn’t want to collapse again in front of his good, brave son. Up ahead, the black hole in the hillside looms like a mirror image of his heart.
Only his studio remains, and the barn. He asks one of his cousins who is in the barn to harness Darby and Joan, then he collects a scythe and walks to Mamah’s garden. It stands, incredibly, nearly untouched by the destruction. Some of her roses have just opened.
He sinks to his knees among the flowers and speaks to her in his mind, waiting to hear her voice come back. Her spirit is not here, though, not even in her garden. He sits back on his heels, smelling the fragrance of a half-dozen different plants, trying to find some comfort in it.
After a while he swings the scythe and cuts down the flowers she loved. John opens the pine box so his father can cover her body with hollyhocks, roses, sunflowers, zinnias. Then he closes it, and they load the box onto the wagon, throwing armfuls of phlox and daisies onto the wagon bed.
It is evening by the time they are ready to go to the chapel graveyard. Storm clouds passing overhead land heavy raindrops on Frank and John as they walk beside the spring wagon, leading the sorrels. At the churchyard, two cousins of Frank wait to help him lower the coffin into the fresh-dug earth. The box is surprisingly heavy. The air is filled with their grunts and the sound of rope rubbing against wood. When it is settled at the bottom, father and son toss flowers onto the box until it is covered and the hole is strewn all around with yellow-, blue-, and red-petaled flowers. Then Frank asks everyone to leave him there alone.
Standing by the open grave, he speaks to her. “You stood everything so bravely, my friend.” They had spoken so often of their spirits and souls as if they were palpable things. He feels no presence, yet he speaks. “You were such a good woman, Mamah,” he says. “The best on earth.”
Before darkness falls completely, he pulls from his pocket a handwritten copy of the Goethe poem they translated together. Some of it he knows from memory, and the rest he reads aloud.
Nature!
We are encompassed and enveloped by her, powerless to emerge and powerless to penetrate deeper.
Unbidden and unwarned she takes us up in the round of her dance and sweeps us along, until exhausted we fall from her arms.
Frank reads the long poem to the end, his voice quaking as cool rain meets hot tears on his face.
She has placed me here; she will lead me hence—
I confide myself to her.
She may do with me what she will: she will not despise her work.
I speak not of her. No, what is true and what is false, she herself has spoken all.
All the fault is hers; hers is all the glory.
CHAPTER 54
In the little bedroom behind the studio, Frank huddles in bed, reliving the past week. On Tuesday both Tom and David died, and on Wednesday Frank buried David in the family plot. Seven dead in all. Only Billy and Fritz have survived.
When he does fall off to sleep, his limbs twitch as he dreams of batting his hands at the mad face of Julian Carlton. He sees Mamah’s burned scalp, the few remaining wisps of her thick hair poking from her head like wild grasses. He leaps up in terror, runs outside to lie on the ground, but everything is soaked. Rain has poured down since the night he buried her. On Sunday night, in fact, there was a hailstorm.
Some would take the hail, along with the whole nightmare, as a sign of heaven’s reckoning with Mamah Borthwick. He doesn’t have to hear “It was God’s hand” to know that it is being said. On Monday, when he reads the account of the tragedy in the Sunday Chicago Tribune, every line seems pregnant with unwritten words: divine retribution.
In a spurt of rage, he composes a letter to the Weekly Home News. The pen’s tip nearly slashes the paper as he writes.
To My Neighbors:
To you who have rallied so bravely and well to our assistance—to you who have been invariably kind to us all—I would say something to defend a brave and lovely woman from the pestilential touch of stories made by the press for the man in the street, even now with the loyal fellows lying dead beside her, any one of whom would have given his life to defend her. I cannot bear to leave unsaid things that might brighten memory of her in the mind of anyone. But they must be left unsaid. I am thankful to all who showed her kindness or courtesy, and that means many. No community anywhere could have received the trying circumstances of her life among you in a more high-minded way. I believe at no time has anything been shown her as she moved in your midst but courtesy and sympathy. This she won for herself by her innate dignity and gentleness of character but another—perhaps any other community—would have seen her through the eyes of the press that even now insists upon decorating her death with the fact, first and foremost, that she was once another man’s wife, “a wife who left her children.”
That must not be forgotten in this man-made world. A wife still is “property.” And yet the well-known fact that another bears the name and title she once bore had no significance. The birds of prey were loosed upon her in death as well as in life…. But this noble woman had a soul that belonged to her alone—that valued womanhood above wifehood or motherhood. A woman with a capacity for love and life made really by a…finer courage, a higher more difficult ideal of the white flame of chastity than was “moral” or expedient and for which she was compelled to crucify all that society holds sacred and essential—in name….
In our life together there has been no thought of secrecy except to protect others from the contaminating stories of newspaper scandal; no pretense of a condition that did not exist. We have lived frankly and sincerely as we believed and we have tried to help others to live their lives according to their ideals.
Neither of us expected to relinquish a potent influence in our children’s lives for good—nor have we. Our children have lacked the atmosphere of an ideal love between father and mother—nothing else that could further their development. How many children have more in the conventional home? Mamah’s children were with her when she died. They have been with her every summer. She felt that she did more for her children in holding high above them the womanhood of the mother than by sacrificing it to them. And in her life, the tragedy was that it became necessary to choose the one or the other….
Nor did Mamah ever intend to devote her life to theories or doctrines. She loved Ellen Key as everyone does who knows her. Only true love is free love—no other kind is or ever can be free. The “freedom” in which we joined was infinitely more difficult than any conformity with customs could have been. Few will ever venture it. It is not lives lived on this plane that menace the well-being of society. No, they can only serve to ennoble it….
Mamah and I have had our struggles, our differences, our moments of jealous fear for our ideals of each other—they are not lacking in any close human relationship—but they s
erved only to bind us more closely together. We were more than merely happy even when momentarily miserable….
Her soul has entered me and it shall not be lost.
You wives with your certificates for loving—pray that you may love as much or be loved as well as was Mamah Borthwick! You mothers and fathers with daughters—be satisfied if what life you have invested in them works itself out upon as high a plane as it had done in the life of this lovely woman. She was struck down by a tragedy that hangs by the slender thread of reason over the lives of all, a thread which may snap at any time in any home with consequences as disastrous….
She is dead. I have buried her in the little chapel burying ground of my people…and while the place where she lived with me is a charred and blackened ruin, the little things of our daily life gone, I shall replace it all little by little as nearly as it may be done. I shall set it all up again for the spirit of the mortals that lived in it and loved it—will live in it still. My home will still be there.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Taliesin
August 20, 1914
When the letter is finished, he is spent. He passes it to one of the workmen to take into Spring Green, then climbs into bed once again.
How he longs to feel the life they had together. Even just a few minutes would be a gift. My God, how they lived. They were alive. Together. For a fleeting moment he can picture the exact green of her eyes. In summer she always wore pale blue dresses, and the green turned her eyes aqua blue.
He remembers a morning a few weeks ago. He had come home from the chaos at Midway Gardens for a one-day respite. “Let’s go riding tomorrow,” she had said the moment she saw him, sensing how desperately he needed to get away from mortar and cement and the tension of the construction site.
