Loving Frank (12 page)

Wasmuth’s wife appeared emboldened by the success of the evening.

“Your eyes are swollen,” she said, taking Mamah’s hand. “I was moved, too, my dear.” Her voice was uncomfortably intimate. “Would you tell your husband, Mrs. Wright, that my husband considers it a privilege to work with a man of his genius?”

The anger Mamah had felt in the theater surged up inexplicably into her throat. Her temples pounded as she translated.

Frank bowed graciously toward the woman, then leaned back, considering the matter before he spoke. “Tell her a genius is merely the man who sees nature, and has the boldness to follow it.”

Mamah turned back to Frau Wasmuth and spoke softly to her. The woman’s neck began to redden from the collar up, until her face was nearly the hue of the port in her glass. She stood up and spoke privately with her husband. Wasmuth made a quick apology for his wife.

“Is she ill?” Frank asked.

“Yes,” said Wasmuth, calling for the check. “Yes. We must go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Strange,” Frank said when they were gone. “Did I say the wrong thing? I suppose I should have returned the compliment…some malarkey.”

“No, my love,” Mamah said, leaning over to kiss his brow. “It’s my fault. I told her I am not Mrs. Wright.”

CHAPTER
18

A Hymn to Nature

Nature!

We are encompassed and enveloped by her, powerless to emerge and powerless to penetrate deeper.

T
hey sat on the sofa facing the window. The little Goethe book lay between them. Mamah moved her finger over the third line of the poem, then wrote quickly on the paper in her lap.

“‘Unbid and unforewarned…’” she read.

“Awfully stiff right off the bat,” Frank said, scratching his scalp. “How about ‘unbidden and unwarned’…”

“Sounds better.” She wrote the correction above the line, then translated the next line. “‘Into the gyrations of her dance she lifts us, whirling and swirling us onward, until exhausted from her arms we fall.’”

Frank looked over at the paper she held. “‘Gyrations’ is harsh, don’t you think? It suggests a dervish, that line. I think this whole idea of our dance with life—it’s gentler than that, more like a waltz.”

Mamah pensively tapped her mouth with the pencil.

“Don’t put lead on those lips,” he said.

She wrote some words, crossed others out. “How is this?” she said a minute later. “‘Unbidden and unwarned, she takes us up in the round of her dance and sweeps us along, until, exhausted, we fall from her arms.’”

He pushed a long strand of dark hair behind her ear. “Lovely,” he said.

SHE WENT WITH FRANK
that morning to the office. Ernst Wasmuth seemed flustered to have her there as a translator now that he knew who—
what
—she was. He had stepped into their personal drama, and he didn’t want to be there. Wasmuth was refined, just enough, and solicitous—she was an attractive woman. But he was a businessman first. It was clear that he found it difficult to stand firm, let alone bully, through her. He had with him his associate, Herr Dorn, who evidently had no such compunctions.

They wanted nine thousand marks upon delivery of four thousand copies of the smaller project, the book of photographs. The big folio of Frank’s perspective drawings would be printed after that—five hundred copies for U.S. distribution, five hundred for European sales. They went back and forth about page counts, type size, duty costs for shipping.

“We have our hands full,” Mamah whispered to Frank when they left Wasmuth’s office.

“What do you make of Dorn?”

“I wouldn’t trust him entirely. Not yet.”

They stopped at the office reception desk, where mail was waiting for Frank. Mamah could see a small pile set out for him on the counter. On top was a postcard with a picture of Unity Temple on it.

“Do you have mail for a Mrs. Cheney, Mamah Cheney?” she asked Wasmuth’s receptionist.

The woman was dressed like so many others she had seen on the street—small bow at her neck, tiny eyeglasses. “We had some,” she said.

“I need to collect that mail,” Mamah said.

The woman looked confused, her eyes traveling from Mamah to Frank. “Oh, my,” she said, rifling through the basket. “It may have been sent back.”

“I forgot to alert them. It’s my fault,” Frank said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

Mamah imagined the look on Edwin’s face on receiving a returned letter. She had given him the Markgrafenstrasse address of Wasmuth’s office.

The woman walked back to the mailroom, and Frank followed her. Mamah reached down and turned over the postcard depicting Unity Temple that sat on top of Frank’s pile.

Oct. 20, 1909

My Dear:

The children miss you, as do I. We hope your health is good and your work is going well.

Your loving wife,
Catherine L. Wright

When she looked up, Frank and the woman were walking toward her. Frank still wore a pained expression.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Wright,” the woman said. “Your friend Mrs. Cheney, she is with you?”

“Yes.”

The woman handed her two letters, one from Edwin, one from Lizzie.

“There was a man here just a couple of days ago, asking after a Mrs. Cheney. I told him we had her mail but didn’t know who she was. I didn’t realize she was traveling with you.”

“A man?” Mamah felt her throat constrict. “What did he look like?”

The clerk looked at the wall, recollecting. “He wore a big overcoat and was bald, a little brown hair around here.” She pointed to the sides of her head. “He spoke English. An American, I believe.” She paused, looking first at Frank, then at Mamah. “He asked after Mr. Wright, too.”

Mamah and Frank walked out to the hallway and leaned against the wall.

“Edwin,” Frank said.

“It has to be.” Mamah stared wide-eyed at him. “He must be in Berlin.”

“Jesus,” Frank muttered, rubbing his forehead with the heel of his palm. “Look, don’t go back to the hotel without me. You’re touring, right? Just spend the day as you planned, then come back and meet me here.” He nodded in the direction of the reception desk. “I’ll figure out meantime if she told him where we’re staying.” He grasped her hands. “If he’s in town, we’ll both confront him. I don’t want you facing him alone.”

“He wouldn’t harm me in the slightest, you know that. And you? You know Edwin. He’s a gentle man at heart—he wouldn’t touch you, I don’t think.” She shook her head. “He’s desperate. Still, I can’t believe he’s come over here.”

“Open it,” Frank said, gesturing to the letter in her hand.

At that moment Wasmuth emerged from the waiting room. “Frank, I have the others at the table now. Are you ready?”

“Go,” Mamah said. “I shall see you this evening at the hotel, not here.” She squeezed his arm. “It will be all right.”

With the letters in her bag, she walked to the train station. The Charlottenburg line was crammed full of people, so she stood and held on to a pole. In front of her, an old man nodded, then woke in a jerk, nodded, jerked, over and over during the ride. Mamah glanced around the car and squinted at the people on the streets, looking for Edwin’s face.

SHE HAD FOUND
the Café des Westens in her Baedeker’s the previous day when she’d mapped out her day, It was a café where the intellectuals were said to hold court. She had imagined a leisurely hour of soup, thick bread, overheard conversations borrowed from the tables around her.

At ten in the morning, the café was filled with intense-looking men huddled over coffee cups. Mamah searched the restaurant for some private spot where she might open the letter. Opposite her was a red telephone booth with a comical bust of Kaiser Wilhelm balanced on top. She walked over to a table near it. Except for an eccentric-looking woman wearing a lamb’s-wool fez and reading a book, the area was empty.

Mamah ordered a cup of tea, then took out the two letters from her bag, ripping open the flap of Edwin’s.

Mamah,

I regret that I cannot speak to you in person. Please afford me the dignity of not showing this letter to him.

How I wish I could see your face! Perhaps it would reveal to me what forces could move you to desert Martha and John in Boulder in such circumstances. This is the part I cannot fathom, Mamah. It is so unlike you that I can only assume you are in great mental distress. More than anger, I feel the deepest worry about you. Frank Wright is a liar to his core, and I fear you can’t see he has got your mind under his control. I can’t believe you are making choices out of your own will. How else can I explain this to myself?

Martha and John and Jessie believe you are on vacation. Louise, Lizzie, and Mother carry on, but none of them is a substitute. The children miss you. I beg you to return to us. I shall do whatever is required to make us a family again.

I haven’t stopped loving you.

Edwin

Mamah sighed deeply. He had mailed the letter from Oak Park on October 23. Today was November…what? November 10. Time enough for him to catch a train to New York, then a boat over here. What was he doing? Traipsing from hotel to hotel looking for her? Neither Frank nor she had told anyone where they were staying. Only Wasmuth.

Mamah opened the drawing Edwin had included from Martha. It was a crayoned figure of a woman, waving from a boat.

She studied Lizzie’s script on the other envelope.
More bitter medicine.
She let the letter sit unopened, glancing instead at the person across from her. The bohemian-looking woman fingered her beaded necklace as she read. She had one booted foot propped on the rung of a chair in front of her.

Mamah sipped her tea, then opened Lizzie’s letter.

Mamah,

I write with a heavy heart for many reasons, but especially for the terrible news it falls to me to convey. Mattie has died. Word came from Alden in a letter yesterday. Her heart must have begun to give out just after you left. By the time Edwin got to Boulder, her brother Lincoln had been called from Iowa…

No, she thought. This is a hoax.

She imagined Lizzie and Edwin sitting across from each other at the dining table, talking late into the night. Concocting some wrongheaded scheme—letters to get her to come home. Fueled by desperation or love, no doubt, but this…And now Edwin, somewhere in Berlin.

Her head began a palsylike shake.
There wasn’t a thing wrong with Mattie.

The edge of a newspaper clipping protruded from Lizzie’s envelope. She pulled it out, read the penciled-in date at the top. October 15. Mamah’s eyes flew down the column, taking in phrases.

M
RS.
A
LDEN
H. B
ROWN

In the death of Mrs. Alden H. Brown yesterday, Boulder loses one of the finest characters among her public-spirited citizens…a resident of Boulder since the spring of 1902…Her unusual character and high mental attainments…the most devoted wife and mother…Her mind was too large to harbor a mean or selfish thought…University of Michigan…taught in the high schools of Port Huron…a shock to the entire community, her apparently excellent health giving no warning of this sudden ending to a useful career…Heart disease with lung involvement…Services at 404 Mapleton…Interment in Vinton, Iowa.

A moan rose from Mamah’s throat. She put her hands over her face. The woman with the book stood up and came toward her.

“Is there something I can do to help?” The woman’s face was next to hers.

“No, no one can help,” Mamah stuttered, weeping. “My friend is dead.”