by T. C. Boyle
“Is this about last night?” I ventured.
“It is.”
“Well, I—once in a while, or just this once, I felt, well, that it would be fitting to welcome some of the new people in a collegial way, let our hair down, that sort of thing—”
“Drinking.”
I held my silence and watched her eyes, dark eyes, as dark and impenetrable as the bricks of baker’s chocolate in the pantry.
“Alcohol,” she said, her lips drawn down in distaste. “Beer, whiskey, gin. And at a low place—how do you call it, a dive?—a dive like Stuffy’s Tavern. What sort of impression do you think this gives to the people who would see Taliesin destroyed? The people of the community, of the press? The gossipmongers?”
I hung my head. Murmured something nonsensical. I was so distraught at this juncture I might even have slipped into Japanese for all I knew.
“And relations between the sexes,” she went on, interlocking her fingers and dropping her hands to her lap. The cold killing light of the rinsed-out afternoon clung like a wrapper to the right side of her face. “We cannot be seen to encourage such a thing, not among the unmarried apprentices, like yourself.” She paused long enough for the dismal sound of the rain to swell up like the background music in a celluloid melodrama. “And this new girl, Daisy. Daisy cannot be compromised. We cannot be compromised. As I am quite certain you are aware. Tadashi.”
There was nothing to say, either in apology or extenuation. “Yes,” I answered.
Another pause, the rain swelling, the fire eating at the log the apprentice on house duty had laid across the andirons. She unclenched her hands and began to rub them, one against the other, as if all the source of her discontent were concentrated in the rough callus of her palms. “Have I made myself understood?”
I bowed as deeply as I could—bowed my shame, my contrition, my capitulation—and then I bowed my way out of the room, turned on one slow muffled heel and crept back to the drafting table like the penitent I was.
Later in the day, just after we quit work at five, Wrieto-San asked to have a word with me. He was in his office, dictating correspondence to his new secretary, Eugene Masselink, and he barely glanced up as I hovered in the entranceway. Had there been a door I would have knocked, but absent that option I just stood there, trying to look at ease, as he orated and Gene Masselink’s pencil flew across the page. “ ‘My Dear Mr. and Mrs. Willey,’ ” he intoned, “ ‘I suppose you are by this time anxious about your architect, more or less convinced that he has not the Willeys much in mind?’ Paragraph. ‘But he is very much on the job notwithstanding delays which are only helpful, let us hope, and with the new home for you very much in heart.’ ”
I stood there through the remainder, which proved to be a combination pep talk, sermon and bill of goods, in equal proportions, before Wrieto-San recognized me. “Tadashi, just a word,” he said, nodding toward me from where he sat at his desk. Gene—he was young, younger than I, lean and loose-jointed, with a prey bird’s beak and a stiff sheaf of hair rising up off the crown of his head like a mold of feathers—looked up in alarm, his glasses catching the light.
“Yes, Wrieto-San,” I said, bowing.
“These women,” he said. He fixed his eyes on me, his architect’s eyes, the eyes that missed no detail, that shone always, even when he was exhausted, as if lit with an internal wattage that never peaked or flagged or brooked an interruption of service. He was Frank Lloyd Wright, the greatest architect of his or any other period, and he was assaying me. Critically. I felt myself shrivel.
“And this consumption of alcoholic beverages.” He paused and felt for his cane without taking his gaze from me. “Alcoholism—and believe me I’ve seen my share of it in the building trades—is a deadly disease, a sickness, a vice. It destroys men, Tadashi”—he’d begun to tap the cane on the cypress floorboards, as if to underscore his point—“without regard to status or race or anything else that distinguishes one man from another. Or woman. Though the vice is of course stronger in the male.”
I began to protest. “But, Wrieto-San, you’ve known me for over a year now. You’ve seen me work. Certainly you, of all people, must know that I am no alcoholic—”
“Denial is the first sign of it. Drink has you in its hold, Tadashi, and Mrs. Wright tells me you’re leading others astray—this business last night—and we just can’t have this sort of behavior at Taliesin. It sullies us. Makes us look like imposters out here in the country where good hard exercise and plain food should be all we need to sustain us.”
“But—”
“And women, Tadashi. Marriage is a serious undertaking and I really do feel that you’re too young and immature at this juncture even to consider an attachment that carries so much—well, essence—not to mention the young woman involved, whose cultural leanings and aspirations may be quite the opposite of what you expect. What is it your people say? ‘A woman should obey her father in youth, her husband in maturity and her son in old age.’ ”
He paused to level a glance on Gene, as if to warn him off too. The cane never stopped tapping. “You are aware, aren’t you, that Miss Harnett is a student of the fine arts, invited here to study sculpture, textiles and painting in addition to absorbing the benefits of living architecture? That she is an independent spirit, hotheaded even—perhaps a bit wild—and that her father, a medical man, has agreed to pay her tuition in part because in his estimation she needed a change of scene? Am I getting through to you?”
I said nothing. My face had colored. I wanted to laugh aloud, spin my head round on my shoulders and bellow “Daisy Hartnett? But that’s crazy!” I’d just met her—I’d known of her existence just over twenty-four hours at this point—and here Wrieto-San was talking of marriage?
He was sober now, his face drawn down round the focal point of his thinly pursed lips. “Sexual matters,” he said. “Intimacy. The sort of thing that belongs properly only to matrimony—this is why she’s here, Tadashi, this is her burden. And we won’t make it heavier for her.”
“I just—Wrieto-San, with all respect, I’ve just met her. And I don’t mean anything, I didn’t know, I just—what about collegiality? One for all and—”
“Tadashi, and I’m very sorry to say this, to have to say this”—he turned away from me, snatched up a draft of the letter and made as if to examine it—“but you’re fired. You’ll have to pack up and go.” And then, softening the blow: “I’m afraid that’s all there is to it.”
There are times in life when you feel as empty as a reed, your inner self obliterated in a thunderclap, all you’ve gained and loved and hoped for gone in a single stroke. I felt it in December of 1941 when the reports came through the radio that Pearl Harbor had been attacked and again in the 1950s when I was living in Paris and a wheezing man in mustache and cap climbed three flights of stairs to hand me the wire notifying me of my father’s death. And I felt it then, felt it as a single savage deracination of the hara, as when Tojo’s militarists turned their swords on themselves in defeat. Fired? Cast out of Taliesin? I’d seen others leave in disgrace for one infraction or another and I couldn’t imagine it for myself. Not yet. Not now.
I bowed. Bowed so deeply I might have touched the floor. And then I heard my own voice emerging in a choked whisper: “Wrieto-San, I accept your judgment as one unworthy of the high ideals of Taliesin.” I paused, my breathing damp and tumultuous. “But before I go, may I ask you one thing about the design for the Robie house? I’ve always, and my countrymen too, we’ve always admired this design as the pinnacle of your Prairie architecture, and I was just wondering how you came up with the solution of situating it to the road on such a narrow lot?”
I remember Wrieto-San setting down the letter and twisting round in his seat to stare at me. It took him a moment, shifting gears, calibrating, a slow flush of anticipatory pleasure infusing his features. “Well, you see,” he began, entirely forgetting himself, “as you point out there was the problem of the site to begin with, a relati
onship to the street, you understand, and the existing structures on the block,” and he talked straight through, hardly drawing a breath, till the dinner bell rang. The rain had let up. It was dark beyond the windows. He stood slowly and stretched himself, as if he were just waking from a nap, looked to Gene, who’d risen too, and then to me, seeing me—really seeing me—for the first time in the course of the hour. “Well, Sato-San,” he said at last, “no harm done really, I suppose. You’ll stay on, then. But no more of this”—he waved his hand as if to signify everything, every possible behavior, every error and slipup and falling away from the path of organic architecture—“this, this . . . anyway, your work has been satisfactory. And if I’m not mistaken, the dinner bell has rung.”
I should point out that in the course of my tenure at Taliesin, I was called on the carpet half a dozen times and thrice fired, each time managing to distract Wrieto-San long enough for his umbrage to dissipate—the fact was that he loved to talk, loved to reminisce, make pronouncements, level judgments and animadversions, never happier than when delivering a sermon on any subject that came to mind, all the while striding back and forth across the floor, twirling his cane and gesticulating, and we apprentices learned to take advantage of it. And I should say too, as will be apparent to attentive readers of the text above, that Daisy and I carried on an exhaustive love affair under the noses of both the Wrights, finding access to various rooms late at night, making use of the fields as the weather warmed, and even, on one memorable occasion, the celebrated windmill tower he’d built as a young man for his aunts and named (appropriately enough for our purposes, as it turned out) Romeo and Juliet. And that the very evening he’d warned me off, not ten minutes after I left him, I walked into the dining room and felt my blood sing in a key that knew no restraint or regulation when I saw Daisy sitting there amongst the others like an empress among the commoners. I meant no disrespect to the Master or to Mrs. Wright either, but I believed then and believe now that no one has the right to proscribe relations between young people who feel a strong mutual attraction. Lovers, that is. We were lovers, Daisy and I, and through all these years I’ve never gone through a single day without thinking of her.
At any rate, it was at about this time that I had an opportunity to prove my worth to Wrieto-San in a more direct way than plying T-square and triangle (or pledging allegiance to some absurd monastic regime, for that matter). It was a brisk day toward the end of October, the sun casting a pale cold eye over the fields, the season in decline, the trees lifeless, even the shadows bleached out and enervated. I was in the orchard picking apples with a crew of apprentices when Wrieto-San came striding over the rise in his jodhpurs and long trailing coat. As he drew closer, we could see that he was wearing a new tweed jacket and the high stiff collar and artiste’s tie he favored on formal occasions. Herbert, who was standing on the seat of the tractor and using a rake to dislodge the fruit from the upper branches, paused a moment. “Looks like he’s getting ready to drive into town,” he observed in his hollow fractured tones. “Wonder which of us is going to be the lucky man?”
Wrieto-San tried not to show favoritism, selecting one or the other of us at whim to accompany him to a potential job site, run an errand or simply pick up a hoe and listen to him expatiate on whatever subject he was revolving at the time. On this particular day, he strode right up to our little group—Esther and Gwendolyn were working with us, as I recall—and sang out, “Tadashi, how about joining me in a little excursion to Madison. To pick up those tools for the Hillside project, I mean, and a few other little necessaries?”
He drove with the top down, though, as I say, the day was brisk and made brisker by the winds generated by the Cord as he accelerated at will past farm vehicles, looming trucks and the creeping shapes of less powerful automobiles. He kept up a discourse the whole way, talking of his lectures and the money and recognition they were bringing Taliesin and how within the coming months we were sure to have a plethora of commissions piling up, enough to keep us all busy in the drafting room six days a week. I wrapped a muffler round my throat, patted at my flying hair and listened. As we came into the outskirts of the city, I couldn’t help feeling a sudden swell of pride—Wrieto-San had selected me as his companion and all the world could see it. There I was, seated at his right hand, trying to look worthy and oblivious at the same time, and failing, I’m afraid, to suppress a smile of the purest bliss. The superlative automobile growled as he shifted gears, the hood shimmering under a fresh coat of apprentice-applied wax, the wheels chopping at the light, and we glided through those depleted streets with their spindly Fords and down-at-the-mouth Chevrolets in an aura of grace and privilege. Everywhere we went, heads turned.
We stopped to eat at the sort of establishment Wrieto-San preferred—a drugstore lunch counter given to excesses of gravy, chopped meat and great mounds of potatoes and succotash—and then went into the hardware store, the Cord stationed at the curb out front and attracting an army of small boys and gaping men in overalls and winnowed hats. Wrieto-San focused all his charm on the man at the counter, paid something on account—he was in arrears for several hundred dollars—and we collected the tools and made our way out the door, Wrieto-San strutting ahead of me while I brought up the rear, burdened with packages.
Just as I stepped out onto the sidewalk, one elbow bracing the door as I stood aside for a stout farmwife in a patched cloth coat who managed to look fleetingly familiar, I was seized from behind. Two arms looped round me, tight as cables, and I was drawn back into a kind of shuffling dance as I lost my grip on the packages and a pair of crowbars and a shingling hatchet rang on the pavement at my feet and wood screws exploded from a brown paper bag. I fought back, twisting my head to get a glimpse of my antagonist, but he’d burrowed his forehead into the crook of my neck for leverage and all I knew of him was his furious reeking breath that came in hard bursts and grunts of labor. “Let go of me!” I shouted, and people were stopping on the street to gaze up in alarm. “Are you mad? Let go!” I jerked furiously. He held tight. We danced across the sidewalk, rebounding from the display window of the hardware store not once but twice, the glass shuddering with the impact. I didn’t know what was happening. I fought to work my right arm free and rake at my attacker’s throat.
And then I saw Wrieto-San and understood. He’d been arrested at the door of the Cord by a farmer in overalls and a sweater torn at the elbows. All the blood was in the farmer’s face. His eyes were squeezed almost shut and there was a single deep trench of animosity dug between them. “You son of a bitch,” he said, and he wasn’t shouting, wasn’t making it a curse or an accusation, merely a statement of fact. “You think you can cheat my wife out of her wages and then ride around in your fancy machine like some sort of king? You think you’re so high and mighty?”
Wrieto-San was puffed up like a rooster, the cane raised in a defensive posture. He backed up against the car, shouting “Stay away from me! Stay away!”
But the farmer wouldn’t stay away and he had no more words. He took a step back to brace himself and then suddenly lashed out, the oversized wedge of his fist jumping out of the sleeve of his sweater to make audible contact with the bone and cartilage of Wrieto-San’s unresisting nose. It was a shattering blow. Wrieto-San—he was in his mid-sixties, remember—floundered, sliding across the polished fender of the Cord like a seal slipping into an incarnadine sea, the cane clattering to the pavement, his hat glancing away all on its own and only his overcoat to break his fall.
“Wrieto-San!” I cried out—bellowed, bleated—and everyone froze in place for the smallest fraction of an instant. And then the arms broke their grip and I whirled round on my attacker—the same slab of a butter-stinking Irish face as the farmer himself, the same eyes, only wider and younger—and there was a swift exchange of meaningless blows even as Wrieto-San, as he described in his account of the incident in the revised edition of An Autobiography, sprang up off the pavement and locked arms with his adversary (only to be flatt
ened again), the two rolling off the curb and into the mud and refuse of the gutter. For a moment, Wrieto-San was on top, the unremitting flow from his mashed-in nose washing over his assailant in such volume and with such force I thought he was bleeding to death, but then the two were tangled again and the farmer was on top, his fist rising and falling in swift violent thrusts. “Take him off!” Wrieto-San was crying. “Take the man off me, for Christ’s sake! He’s killing me!”
I grabbed the farmer by the shoulder and there were others there now too, a big-bottomed shopkeeper in shirtsleeves and galluses wading into the fray while a man in some sort of regimental regalia commanded, “Get out of that now!” in a voice of iron. The farmer whirled round—his neck inflamed, his face the size and color of a prize ham—gave me a violent shove and darted off into the crowd that had materialized out of nowhere.
Several of us helped Wrieto-San to his feet, where he stood woozily against the fender of the Cord, his hair disarranged, one cheek scraped and muddy, a dripping red handkerchief pressed to his nose. “Get that man,” he ordered in an unsteady voice. “I want him arrested. Do you see what he did to me? ” He let his gaze wander over the crowd of storekeepers, farmwives, urchins. “Lawlessness is what it is. Lawlessness right here in the streets of Madison.”
No one moved. The farmer had vanished, along with his son and wife (Mrs. Dunleavy, if you haven’t guessed). It was up to me to help Wrieto-San into the passenger’s seat and tame the violent mechanism of the Cord long enough to get us to the nearest medical facility, where I waited while a stooped old country doctor set and bandaged his nose in a spidery arrangement of gauze and antiseptic tape. And it was up to me to drive us home to Taliesin in the chill of the declining day, with the wind up and Wrieto-San in pugilistic mode. I don’t recall if Boris Karloff had made his dramatic appearance in The Mummy by then, but this was what Wrieto-San looked like, his face lost to its bandages, the cane poking at the darkening sky, his voice rising in wrath and fulmination all the long way home.
