The Women

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  When it came to it—and he was being honest with himself now—he’d never really been satisfied with the command of the rooms nor with the limited space for guests and workers, and here was an opportunity to expand on the original, make the grand rooms grander, improve the sweep of the views and build out to the southwest, elongating the foot of the reversed L that gave the house its shape within the structure of the hill, strengthening the lines, improving the flow85 . . . He’d add a new wing for guests and servants’ quarters and another for his aunts and his mother, just there, to the west. Enlarge the studio, redefine the courtyard. Make the space more intimate and expansive at the same time. He could see it all as if it were standing there before him, graced with light.

  He was so caught up in the concept he couldn’t keep still and before he knew it he was rushing headlong in the dark, through the sodden grass and the clinging fabric of the night, down the slope and through the door to the studio, calling out to his watchman that it was all right, everything was all right. He had a rationale. He had a plan. Mamah, he would do it for Mamah. Spare nothing. Let the details dictate themselves, Taliesin II rising unshakably out of the ashes of Taliesin I as if Isaiah’s Lord were the mildest and gentlest of shepherds leading the way.

  He lingered there a week, eating little, sleeping less. The sores burst and his shirt stuck to his skin. He paced round the ruins, raked through the ashes for the charred fragments of his pottery, rode horseback over the hills, hair streaming and cape flying till he could have been a figure summoned by the Brontës, grieving all the while and yet planning too, the images coming to him in a flood he couldn’t stop. But plans meant nothing sans the wherewithal to realize them, and at the end of the week he left orders with Billy Weston for the cleanup and went back to Chicago. And work.

  At the time he was living in a rented house at 25 East Cedar Street, and when he returned he resolutely kept his mother at arm’s length (he was grieving; he needed to be alone), and resisted overtures from his daughter Catherine (couldn’t he use her help with the housekeeping?) even as he fought Kitty over his monthly payments to her and the disposition of the house in Oak Park where they’d raised the children together. There were projects on the board.86 People were making demands on him. The flow of funds at Midway Gardens had fallen off to a trickle, the finish work stalled even as audiences gathered every evening in an arena that cried out for completion. From the press he absorbed the sort of abuse to which he thought he’d become inured—LOVE BUNGALOW KILLINGS; WILD NEGRO CHEF SLAYS 7; WRIGHT AFFINITY SLAIN—but he felt he had no choice but to issue a statement to controvert the assaults on Mamah’s character, a woman who was better and stronger and more willing to live her ideals than any woman he’d ever known.87

  In the midst of all this, he made the smallest of decisions—a staffing matter, nothing really, the sort of thing he’d dealt with a thousand times over the years—and another woman came into his life. He’d asked around about a housekeeper, someone efficient, quiet, reliable, who could see to his needs in Chicago and then in Spring Green when the renovation started—he was adrift without Mamah there to look after him. The dishes were a nuisance, piled up around the house with unrecognizable crusts of food fused to their surfaces, the rugs were filthy, the linens needed changing, he was running short of shirts and underwear—socks—and he was tired of having to send someone out to the laundry every other day. The smallest thing. That was all he needed. Someone to look after him.

  The morning after he’d put out his inquiries—very early, before he’d even shaved or had a chance to think about eggs, frying pans and maple-cured bacon from the butcher down the street—there was a knock at the door. He was half inclined to ignore it. Who could it be at this hour—a newspaperman hoping to provoke him into providing copy for the evening edition? A creditor demanding payment? Fresh bad news? “Just a minute!” he shouted down the hall from the bathroom. And then, his voice rising in irritation, “Who is it?”

  There was no answer, but the banging at the door continued, grew in volume even. He came out into the hall, beginning to feel alarmed—his nerves were on edge, of course they were—and he called out again. He glanced at his watch. It was quarter past six. Continued banging, peremptory, outraged. He went to the door and jerked it open.

  A tiny wizened woman was standing there on the stoop, her shoulders rounded, her pale blue eyes rising up to him like gas bubbles in a bottle of seltzer water. She was dressed entirely in black, with button-up shoes and a bonnet out of the last century.

  “Yes?” he said, utterly bewildered. Was she lost? Anile? A charity case?

  “I’m here to work,” she said, her voice booming out at him as if she were shouting from across the street. She already had a hand on the door, was already pushing her way past him and into the house.

  “But what are you doing?” he demanded. “Who are you?”

  She stood there a moment, scanning the room, muttering under her breath. Then she set down her bag—and now he saw it, an ear trumpet—and started gathering up the plates in a way that was almost comical. But it wasn’t comical. It was an intrusion. An irritation. He took her by the arm, the flesh there surprisingly firm, and wheeled her around. “Listen, ma’am, madam, you can’t just—”

  She gave him a look and he let go of her arm. “Mrs. Nellie Breen,” she boomed, “but you can call me Mother. It was your assistant at Midway, Mr. Mueller, sent me. You have my deepest condolences and all the redemptive love of the Saints and the Virgin Mary and the Lord Jesus Himself for the terrible afflictions that came down upon your head, which I saw in the newspapers . . . Which way did you say the kitchen was? And I’ll need to see my room, of course.”

  At first he thought she was too frail for housework, but he was wrong there—she worked throughout the day without stint, in a kind of quiet outrage that took itself out on dirt and disorder. And if he thought the ear trumpet laughable, the resort of whiskered nonagenarians, a prop for the vaudeville stage, he quickly came to appreciate its value. He wanted efficiency. He wanted quiet. And there really wasn’t much need to communicate with Mother Breen, not after they’d got through the initial civilities and the dishes were soaking in a pan of hot water in the sink.

  The weeks began to topple forward, a series of unanchored pillars thundering to earth one after another. He barely slept. And when he did sleep he was plagued with nightmares, the face of Carleton, a scrim of blood, the children’s hacked limbs and the creeping damp inadmissible blotches that infested the sheets under which they lay splayed like roots torn from the earth. Rigor mortis. He’d never known what the term meant, never wanted to know, the miniature bodies laid out in a grotesque parody of rest and surcease. When he closed his eyes, even for a minute, he saw the dead children, saw Mamah, and then the naked pillars and the ghostly chimneys rose up as in a separate reality, skewed, out of plumb, irremediably wrong. No design. There was no design. Just chaos.

  He turned to work, buried himself in it—and it might have sustained him if it weren’t for the eternal vagaries of finance. Though Midway Gardens had opened to grand success at the end of June—a thousand and more of Chicago’s upper crust gathered there in tuxedoes and gowns, the National Symphony Orchestra playing three separate concerts, Pavlova dancing, the hoi polloi mobbing the outdoor beer gardens and everyone enthusiastic in their praise—September came on and still the final details were left unfinished. Waller88 was out of money, flat and busted, and that was that. There were gaps everywhere, art glass yet to be installed, sculptures, murals, but no amount of pleading, anger, resentment or even logic could sway the man—the money was gone and Frank would just have to be patient. Patient? He needed a return, needed money of his own to reconstruct Taliesin, and where was his fee? Where was his recompense for the hundreds of hours he’d put in? For Taliesin? For Mamah?

  At home, in the evenings, Mother Breen fussed over him and he ate alone—roasts, Irish stew, broiled lamb and Lake Michigan whitefish in cream sauce—then sat workin
g on the plans for Taliesin, the drama of creation taking him out of himself for hours at a time. Mother Breen chattered all the while in her jagged unmodulated tones, inculcating him in the details of her private life as she served the meat, cleared the table, ran a ceaseless broom over the floors, and the sound of her voice, a feminine voice for all its stridulation, was as comforting in his present state as a choir of angels. She was a widow, he learned, née McClanahan, with references from Monsignor O’Reilly and the Howard Turpetts, with whom she’d been in service for thirty-two years till the cholera took them both on a trip to the Orient. Her daughter—she had just one daughter and four sons, scattered to the winds—had been a disappointment to her. She went to mass each morning at five to pray for her and for her sons and for him too (“Mr. Wright,” she’d say, dropping her voice from the key of fulmination to something like a shout, “I wear my knees out over you, don’t you know? ”) and again after she served the evening meal. She slept under three blankets, even on the hottest nights. “Rheumatism,” she explained. “The curse of the old.” And she looked at him as if he could commiserate, but he wasn’t old, not yet—forty-seven last June and each day feeling his strength and determination returning by increments.

  He took her to Wisconsin with him on the train and left her to fight the incursion of ash in the studio, the back bedroom, the kitchen, the pantry and anywhere else a window was left open or a shoe had found its mark, while he walked the site and conferred with Billy Weston and Paul Mueller over what needed to be done. She was a fury and she brought order to the house in a way his own mother never could have, because his own mother, though he loved her more than any other woman in the world and needed her now more than ever, would have nagged and coddled and irritated him in a way this new mother, this artificial mother, never did. Mother Breen. She cooked for the men, she scrubbed and washed and ironed, and she never heard a word you said.

  Gradually, through the fading haze of September and on into the rains of October and the early enduring freeze that was November that year, the old rhythms reasserted themselves. He traveled freely between Spring Green and Chicago, cajoling clients, submitting plans and proposals, looking out for materials and browsing shops and galleries for things of beauty to replace what had been destroyed. He manipulated accounts, wrote checks against insufficient funds, placated his daughter when she came round again and again wondering if there was any way she could help—with correspondence, dusting, anything. And his mother. He spent as much time with her as he could, assuring her that he was rebuilding for her, so that she and Aunts Nell and Jane could be with him permanently,89 and she seemed mollified, though she kept asking about Mrs. Breen. Who was she? Why was she at his side at a time like this instead of his own mother who’d given birth to him and raised him up to be what he was? Could she cook—was that it? He preferred her cooking to his own mother’s? Most of all, though, he worked to rebuild Taliesin, laboring side by side with the men in the bitterest weather, oblivious to the cold and discomfort, watching the patterns emerge day by day from the farrago of wood and stone and stucco.90 His muscles ached. He began to recover the weight he’d lost. The nightmares fell away in the face of exhaustion and he slept as he’d always slept, in an unbroken descent into the deepest oblivion.

  Throughout it all he continued to receive letters of sympathy from friends and strangers alike, hundreds of letters, an avalanche, so many he couldn’t possibly begin to answer them. Each day there was a new sheaf of envelopes on his desk, the newspapers having whipped up an outpouring of unfettered emotion from people all over the world who wanted to share in his grief, wanted to tell him of their own losses and bereavements, reassure him, scold him, praise and criticize and offer up their prayers. He couldn’t read the letters, not after the first few. They depressed and irritated him. Who were these people to think they could invade his life, whether they meant well or not? Was this notoriety? Was this what notoriety meant? People nosing into your private life like parasites, digging at your soul, insinuating themselves through two thin sheets of paper?

  “Burn them,” he told his secretary. “All of them. Unless they’re from people I know and want to know. Friends, clients, family. Burn the rest. I don’t want to see them.”

  And so it went. But the secretary, a judicious woman, set aside some of the more intriguing and compassionate specimens, thinking they would appeal to his sense of himself in a very specific and therapeutic way. She bound these letters with a strip of ribbon and every few days set them down on his desk. “I thought these might interest you,” she would say, quickly adding, “I’ve burned the rest.”

  One morning in early December she laid a single letter on his desk. “This one seems very heartfelt,” she murmured, and he looked up at the catch in her voice. She gave him a weak smile and excused herself. A cold rain fell beyond the windows. He got up a moment to poke at the fire, then went back to the drawing he was working on, pushing the letter to the corner of his desk. For the next hour, he barely glanced up, trying out one idea after another for the Japanese, envisioning a hotel that would be neither Oriental nor Western, a grand edifice that might combine some of the structural elements of Midway Gardens, layered stone, brick, with a pool out front to bring it down to earth and reflect its lines—preliminary sketches, that was all, because the commission wasn’t assured, not yet. Though it would be, he was confident of that, and he couldn’t help calculating the commission on a building with a nearly limitless budget, two million, three, maybe more. He’d forgotten all about the letter, but when he next glanced up, there it was, in a cream-colored envelope embossed with the initials MMN.

  He took it up idly, his mind in Japan still. A faint scent of perfume rose to him, as if a new presence had entered the room, a woman’s presence, sleek and refined and dwelling in abstraction. He put his nose to the envelope—he couldn’t help himself, and how long had it been? It was addressed in a bold looping hand that seemed to leap off the page to Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect; the return address gave a street number and arrondissement in Paris, but the postmark was stamped Chicago, Illinois. He unfolded the letter and began to read with an absorption so complete it was as if a spell had come over him:

  Dear Mr. Wright,

  I am writing to express my deepest sympathy and shock over your tragic loss, knowing how painful such a loss can be, especially at this time of the year, when we all look back upon our sorrows and blessings in the approach of Yuletide as if gazing into a reflection in the vast darkling mere of our lives. Oh, to think of the hand the Fates deal us! Love and death poised in counterpoint, cruelly, cruelly! For I too have borne the terrible tragedy of a loss in love and life and I can tell you that you must think not of what might have been, but of your loved one arisen in the ecstasy of eternal being. We are kindred souls, we two. Battered souls, souls yearning for the shore of lightness and floral display to show its face amongst the battering waves of the dark seas of despair . . .

  The confident flowing hand led him on through fifteen closely inscribed pages offering hope and resignation in equal parts and assuring him that new associations, new challenges and joys awaited him as they awaited her and all those whose spirits were undamped and unbowed. In Sympathy and Affectionate Hope, the writer concluded and gave a Chicago address beneath the ecstatic looping flourish of her name: Madame Maude Miriam Noel.

  CHAPTER 2: ENTER MIRIAM

  She was sunk into the sofa in Norma’s sitting room—or living room, as they called it here—taking a cup of tea and idly shifting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle round the end table for lack of anything better to do, when Norma came in with the mail. Outside, beyond the gray frame of the window, the weather was dreary, funereal clouds strung from the rooftops like laundry hung out to dry, and so cold even the dirty gray ratlike pigeons were huddled against it, dark motionless lines of frozen feathers and arrested beaks blighting the eaves as far as she could see down both sides of the block. She hadn’t been out of the house in two days, hadn’t been o
ut of her wrapper, because this cold was like some sort of cosmic joke, a cold beyond anything Paris had seen since the glaciers withdrew in some unfathomable prehistoric epoch when people still went round dwelling in caves. Chicago. How could anyone ever possibly live here?

  Of course, she reminded herself, she was a refugee now,91 and would have to make the best of it. And Norma was sweet, she was, though the apartment was cluttered and overheated, the wallpaper ludicrous, the decor what you might expect of a curio shop, and where was her daughter’s taste? Had she learned nothing from her mother’s example? Inherited nothing? Was it all Emil, then, was that it? Her dead husband’s face waxed a moment in her consciousness, and he’d been a good man, really, quiet, considerate, supportive, but with just about as much artistic sensibility in his entire body as she possessed in one little finger. The apartment. Norma’s clothes. Her son-in-law. She felt the anger come up in her in a buoyant rush, the words already forming on her tongue, wounding words, nagging, but constructive, reconstructive, because it was a tragedy to live like this, to, to—when Norma said, “Mama, there’s something here for you.”

  And then it was in her hand, an off-white envelope decorated with a single red square in the lower left-hand corner and above it the initials FLLW. She set down her teacup. It might have been her imagination, but the day seemed to brighten just perceptibly, as if the sun really did exist out there somewhere amidst all that gloom. The anger she’d felt so intensely just a moment earlier dissolved in a sunset glow of warmth and satisfaction. Norma was studying her. “What is it, Mama?” she asked, an anticipatory smile on her lips. “Good news?”

  Miriam didn’t answer, not right away. She was going to take her time because she didn’t have to open the letter, not yet—she already knew what it would say, more or less. He would thank her in an elaborate, courtly way. Express how deeply moved he was to hear of her commiseration and how truly he wished to return the sentiment. He would be intrigued too—he had to know who she was who could know his heart so intimately. There would be all this and more: an invitation. To meet. At his studio. His home. A grand room someplace, one of his shining creations, lit softly with his exquisite lamps, the light of the hearth gathering overhead in the oiled beams, his prints and pottery emerging from the shadows to lend the perfect accents. He would be honored, et cetera, and he didn’t mean to be impertinent in any way, but he just had to see her—see this marvel of perception—in the flesh, if only for the briefest few fleeting moments.