Loving Frank

by Nancy Horan

  They went out to a strip of prairie the next day with a picnic bag, as always, strapped onto Champion’s flank. It was a glorious summer morning, as lovely as he could remember. Even the horses seemed charged by the air. They rode on a trail for a mile or two, then waded through mustard-colored goldenrod and purple asters to a small clearing. Mamah was wearing her old riding breeches. She dismounted and took down her bag of picnic things.

  Frank walked the horses a short distance away and tied them to an oak. One of the horses let go a heavy stream of urine, and she called out, “Is that you?” She was teasing, of course, but she knew it could have been him. She found it amusing that he often “marked his spot” out in the woods, like a dog, whenever he was assessing a possible building site.

  “Just surveying, dear,” he’d called back.

  Gertrude had made sandwiches naked of anything but thick slabs of cheese. Frank bit into one and frowned. “She must have been reading the funnies when she made these.”

  “Ah, but there’s dessert,” Mamah said. She unwrapped the cookies, delicious-looking things with pecans in them. They ate them all.

  “Blue gentian,” she said after a while, peering through her horn-rimmed spectacles at a low-growing flower near the edge of the blanket.

  “Did you wear your glasses all the time when I first fell in love with you?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  He reached over and took them off her. “You know, if you exercised your eyeballs, you wouldn’t need the things.”

  She laughed her trilling giggle that cascaded down to an earthy guffaw. “You are susceptible to some of the silliest ideas, have I told you that?”

  “And the boots are certainly a recent development,” he said. “I regret to say I bought the damn things. You used to wear the most delicate little leather boots.” He unlaced them and pulled them off. “And look at these socks. Where are we, the Crimea?” He removed the thick cotton stockings she wore. He rose on his knees and went behind her back, unbuttoning her loose blouse, then her camisole. Mamah smiled up at him.

  “There she is,” he said, pulling off the dented straw hat. What he saw was dark brown hair shot through with strands of silver. A woman of forty-five sitting nearly naked under the unforgiving sun. And yet, my God, how exquisitely lovely she was!

  He stretched her out on the blanket. For a moment he looked up. The sky was almost the color of the gentian, as big and blue as he had ever seen it. The wind raked through the tall grasses, sending up lapping sounds, like waves.

  FRANK OPENS HIS EYES. All around his bed, he sees crippled salvage from the fire—a rolled-up carpet reeking of smoke, the two chairs they used for sitting in front of the fireplace, both now missing legs. When he closes his eyes again, the memory is gone. What he does not know is that he will not be able to retrieve her again like that. He will try. He will say to himself, She loved to joke. She had a wonderful laugh. But he won’t be able to hear it, not for a very long time.

  THE NUMBNESS THAT propelled him through Mamah’s burial—through the funerals of David and Ernest, through the terrible scenes of mourning when the families of Tom Brunker and Emil Brodelle’s fiancée came to get their bodies—has abandoned him. Now there are only two states: pain and, when he manages to sleep, the absence of pain. It is two weeks since he came home to the devastation at Taliesin. When he can’t sleep, he rises in the middle of the night to sit outside in the darkness. The memory of the death smell can come at any moment to him, filling his nose, sickening his stomach. His back and neck have broken out in boils. He is thin and listless. Even his heart has begun to beat differently. It leaps up all of a sudden, knocks against his ribs, and then races for minutes at a time. The storm of anger that propelled him to write the letter has shrunk to a rock of sorrow inside his gut.

  He asks why: Why such a decent woman who wanted only to do good with her life? Why now, after so much struggle, when the life they coveted—together—was finally upon them?

  No answers come. He wonders if there is some cosmic logic to it all, that those who stand tallest are the ones that lightning finds. But he tosses aside the notion. To believe that would be as wrongheaded as to believe it was God’s retribution. No, it was the kind of bad luck that life deals out at random. Mamah was in the way of a madman. There is no better explanation.

  In the weeks to come, Frank reads that Julian Carlton, too weak to be tried, has died in jail, having revealed nothing of his motives except his anger at Emil. He has starved to death, either from the damage of the acid or from the will to die. Gertrude is found innocent of wrongdoing and is released. For the people of Iowa County whose lives for a few hours that August day were held in a grip of terror, the fears pass. But for Frank, the horror continues.

  He allows no one close to him to come near. Anna Wright has visited him time and again, yet he cannot bear the kindness of her or Jennie or his children. He waves his mother away whenever she appears, however stricken her face may be. She has taken to leaving food for him on plates just inside the door, on the floor. Now, if he talks to anyone, it is to the workmen who have come to clear the site. The only relief from the crushing sorrow is work.

  There is no hope in trying to communicate with Mamah’s spirit. The closest he can come is to ask himself, What would she have me do? He doesn’t need to hear Mamah’s voice inside his head. He has no doubt what her answer would be.

  WHEN A KNOCK comes on the door one morning, he expects to see his mother’s face. To his surprise, it’s Billy Weston. The carpenter stands squarely, his legs apart, his head and one of his arms bandaged. Frank has not seen him since the funeral of his son, Ernest.

  “Come in,” Frank says.

  Billy steps into the studio. He looks around at the room crammed with odd stuff salvaged from the fire. His eyes linger on the battered piano before he speaks. “I heard you’re thinking about building again.”

  “You heard right.” Frank shows the carpenter the floor plan laid out on the drafting table. He doesn’t have to explain anything to Billy Weston. When he points to the location of a new loggia on the drawing, he doesn’t have to say, This is the place where the worst of it happened. He doesn’t have to explain that he has changed things so he won’t be reminded of the murders. Someday, when he stands in that loggia, he will be able to look out and see the Lloyd Jones family chapel and churchyard in the distance. Billy knows that.

  “Are you up to building another Taliesin?” Frank asks.

  Billy straightens his back and lifts his chin. “A man’s got to work.”

  “What about your arm?”

  “Temporary.”

  “Could you come here every day after all that’s happened?”

  Billy doesn’t answer. The blue eyes grow watery. He looks away and sees the box full of glass shards and paper scraps. He steps over and picks up a chip of pottery. “You going to glue this stuff or what?”

  “I’m going to build it into the new house. Maybe mix it into the concrete for the foundation.”

  “We could do that,” Billy says. His eyes return a comprehending gaze. “We could do that.”

  Frank rolls up the plan. Outside, he unfurls it and holds it open so Billy can see it. The carpenter studies it, then walks beside Frank as they pace out the perimeter.

  AFTERWORD

  Loving Frank is a work of fiction based on events relating to the love affair of the brilliant and controversial architect Frank Lloyd Wright and one of his clients, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. In 1903, Mamah, along with her husband Edwin Cheney, commissioned Wright to design a house for their family on East Avenue in Oak Park, Illinois. This book portrays the period from 1907 to 1914, during which the Wright/Cheney affair flourished.

  Anyone who lives in Oak Park, as I did for twenty-four years, quickly absorbs information about Frank Lloyd Wright. The village was a growing suburb of Chicago in 1889 at the time the architect designed a home for his wife, Catherine, himself, and their family, which eventually grew to six chi
ldren. In time, Oak Park was Wright’s laboratory during his “prairie period,” when he refined, with each new house he created, his evolving ideas about organic architecture. Today, especially in summer, Oak Park’s streets are peopled with tourists from around the world who come to see the many houses he designed there and to experience firsthand the architect’s legendary spaces. Wright is Oak Park’s most famous citizen (Ernest Hemingway runs a close second), and his home and studio complex has been restored to its appearance as it was in 1909, the year the architect left town.

  I don’t remember when I first learned about Mamah Borthwick Cheney, but I recall vividly a long-ago tour I took of his home and studio, at the end of which someone asked, “Why did Wright leave in 1909?” While the name of Mamah Cheney was not included in the answer, the tour guide explained the awkward truth: The famous architect, who had celebrated in his buildings the values of family and home, had departed for Europe in 1909 with the wife of a client, never to reside permanently with his family again. Eventually I learned that Mamah and Edwin Cheney’s house was just a few blocks north of my own home on East Avenue. I had passed the house many times on my morning walks, unaware of its history. Upon learning a few facts about Mamah, I found myself pausing in front of the low-slung brick house, wanting to know more.

  Frank Lloyd Wright wrote volumes about architecture during his long life, and also wrote an autobiography. Scholars have documented Wright’s life and explored his work in hundreds of publications. Yet very little information has been available about Wright’s relationship with Mamah Cheney. The architect’s biographers have lamented the lack of any remaining correspondence between the two. In the absence of personal papers belonging to Mamah, I pieced together what details of her life I could find from old newspapers, memoirs by Oak Parkers, census reports, histories of the places she lived, books on women’s roles during the early part of the twentieth century, and Wright’s brief account of her in his autobiography. How thrilling it was, then, to discover two years into the project the existence of ten letters Mamah wrote to Ellen Key, the Swedish feminist for whom she translated. Here was Mamah’s own voice! And while the letters were primarily concerned with the business of translating, in a few sentences here and there Mamah Borthwick Cheney opened her heart and revealed her innermost feelings to the woman she’d chosen to be her mentor. The details provided by the correspondence helped me form a clearer picture of who she was and what her life was like during her affair with Wright.

  A historical novelist can approach a subject in many ways. In this case, I chose to hew as close as possible to the historical record, not only because I was writing about real events in the lives of real people, but also because I found the documented parts of their story so compelling. Still, there were great gaps. By overlaying Wright’s well-documented life with Mamah’s as it played out in her letters and other records; by examining the ideas and events that enlivened the times and places in which they lived; and by integrating what Mamah was translating and Frank was writing, a picture of their characters and experiences over a seven-year period evolved. That framework allowed me a comfortable platform from which to imagine the personal relationship between Mamah and Frank, and to create events and characters, some of whom are based on real people (Mattie Chadbourne Brown, Lizzie Borthwick, Taylor Woolley, and Billy Weston, to name a few) and others who are not.

  The excerpts of news articles throughout the book are taken from actual press coverage of the time. On the other hand, all letters in the book are invented, with the exception of an excerpt from one of Mamah’s letters to Ellen Key, written in 1911, and the editorial letter Frank Lloyd Wright wrote in 1914 to the Spring Green Weekly News.

  Mamah Borthwick Cheney was an intellectual, a mother, a feminist, and a translator. In the midst of her tumultuous affair with Wright, she translated from Swedish an essay by Ellen Key titled “The Torpedo Under the Ark—Ibsen and Women.” In the essay, Key analyzes the female characters created by Henrik Ibsen, whose 1879 play A Doll’s House shook the theatrical world when its lead character, Nora, departed her marriage rather than continue to be treated by her husband as a compliant doll. Key notes that the playwright took pleasure in portraying the precise moment when his women characters, feeling confined by their milieu, revolt and struggle for freedom. (“With joy I lay my torpedo under the ark,” wrote Ibsen.) Key pointed out that the playwright found it more interesting to explore in his plays the organic, evolving character of the woman rather than the determined, already-defined character of the contemporary male.

  “It is the woman who has wholly desired, wholly loved, yes, often wholly sinned,” wrote Ellen Key. “Almost invariably it is the woman who breaks out of the cage, or the ark, or the dollhouse. And [Ibsen] believes that she, without the barriers, will find her right road, led by a surer instinct than man. For Ibsen there is no higher moral…law than the devotion of the personality to its ideal.” In Ibsen’s view, Key went on, the proof of a person’s greatness is “the power to stand alone; to be able, in every individual case, to make his own choice; in action to write anew his own law, choose his own sacrifices, run his own dangers, win his own freedom, venture his own destruction, choose his own happiness.”

  I suspect that Mamah Borthwick Cheney reflected deeply as she read that passage in the original Swedish, and surely brought to bear her own life’s experience as she translated it into the words above.

  SOURCES

  Certain books were invaluable to me in the course of researching Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Among these are Anthony Alofsin’s Frank Lloyd Wright—The Lost Years 1910–1922; Meryl Secrest’s Frank Lloyd Wright, and Brendan Gill’s Many Masks, both biographies; Wright’s Autobiography; and My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright, by John Lloyd Wright.

  No one wrote more eloquently about his architecture than Frank Lloyd Wright himself. His essays, grouped together in Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings, edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, illuminate his work. Other sources include “Taliesin, 1911–1914,” Wright Studies, Vol. I, edited by Narciso Menocal; Frank Lloyd Wright and Midway Gardens, by Paul Kruty; Wrightscapes, by Charles E. Aguar and Berdeana Aguar; Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin, by Frances Nemtin; Frank Lloyd Wright Remembered, by Patrick Meehan, editor; Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan, by Julia Meech; Beyond Architecture: Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin, edited by Anne Watson. A slender Dover book, Understanding Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture, by Donald Hoffman, explains Wright’s work in simple, elegant prose.

  A handful of scholars have been in the forefront of seeking to understand Mamah Borthwick Cheney’s role in Wright’s life. Anne Nissen’s 1988 M.I.T. master’s thesis, From the Cheney House to Taliesin: Frank Lloyd Wright and Feminist Mamah Borthwick, was among the earliest to explore Cheney’s influence on Wright’s architecture. In a 1995 academic journal called NORA, Lena Johannesson, a professor of art history at Linkoping University in Sweden, published an essay titled, “Ellen Key, Mamah Bouton Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright.” It was this article that alerted me to the location of Mamah’s letters in the Ellen Key collection at the Swedish Royal Library in Stockholm.

  Family Memories of Four Sisters is a memoir written by Margaret Belknap Allen, who lived next door to the Cheneys and was a playmate of John and Martha Cheney. Her recollections of the children and Mamah were like gold nuggets. Also helpful was Yesterday, Jean Guarino’s history of Oak Park; and Phyllis Smith’s A Look at Boulder from Settlement to City. Incredibly moving is the poem “A Summer Day that Changed the World,” written by Edna Meudt, a friend of the Cheney children at Taliesin who grew up to be Wisconsin’s poet laureate.

  Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1880–1918, by Emily D. Bilski, is a wonderful description of the rise of Modernism in Germany, and introduced me to the poet Else Lasker-Schüler. Sources on feminism in the early twentieth century include Floyd Dell’s Women as World Builders: The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an autobiography; and Feminism
in Germany and Scandinavia, by Katherine Anthony. All of Mamah Borthwick’s translations of Ellen Key’s work provided a window into the translator as well as the philosopher.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people were instrumental in bringing Loving Frank to publication. I want to thank Susanna Porter, my editor at Ballantine, my agent, Lisa Bankoff, and the other wonderful people—readers, and sources of information and support—who helped in the making of this book: Elizabeth Austin, Barry Beck, William Drennan, John and Ellen Drew, Kathleen Drew, Heiko Dorenwendt, Dixie Friend Gay, Jane Hamilton, Polly Hawkins, Kathy Horan, Tom Horan, Steve James, Susan Kaplan, Alex Kotlowitz, Bob Kotlowitz, Gretta Moorhead, Karyn Murphy, Leslie Ramirez, Judy Roth, Jim Rutledge, Friedbert Weiman, Bob Willard, and Maria Woltjen.

  Librarians became my heroes during the research process for Loving Frank. I am grateful for the help of Grace Lewis at Oak Park Public Library, and Wendy Hall at the Carnegie Library in Boulder, and for the assistance of the Frank Lloyd Wright Home & Studio Research Center, the Getty Archive in Los Angeles, the Royal Library of Sweden in Stockholm, and the Oak Park Historical Society. Thanks also to the Ragdale Foundation, where I enjoyed two fruitful writing sojourns as a resident.

  Special thanks go to a group of readers whose thoughtful insights were priceless: Elizabeth Berg, Veronica Chapa, Pam Todd, and Michele Weldon; and to my sister, Colleen Berk, for her wisdom, support, and willingness to read numerous manuscript permutations.

  Finally, I want to thank my husband, Kevin Horan, for his humor, encouragement, and unwavering faith, and for the love and good cheer of my sons, Ben and Harry, during the writing of this book.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR