Loving Frank (26 page)

“Well,” Anna replied, “we shall see what Mr. Wright has to say about that. I, for one, don’t reimburse bad judgment.”

Lil took off her apron and threw it on the floor. She stormed out the door and leaped into her truck. Mamah watched as the battered vehicle trailed a funnel cloud of brown dust down the road and out to the highway.

“Good riddance,” Anna muttered when Mamah came back into the kitchen. She put on an old apron and began moving briskly around the stifling room. “We’ll have chicken stew tonight for dinner,” she said with the slightest hint of cheer in her voice. She went out into the dooryard, lifted a hatchet from its hook, then headed for the chicken coop. When she returned a half hour later, she carried six headless carcasses in the sling of her bloody apron, which she held with one hand. A fistful of herbs was in the other. The contretemps with Lil seemed to have elevated her spirits, because she began talking, apparently to Mamah, as she was the only other person in the kitchen.

“People will take advantage of you when they can, even in the country,” Anna said, her voice thick still with a Welsh accent. “Especially if they take you for an outsider.” Anna smirked as she ripped feathers out of the birds. “That woman doesn’t know who she’s talking to.” She wiped sweat off her upper lip with her sleeve. “If she did, she wouldn’t try to get away with that nonsense. She probably got a decent price and is trying to gouge us.”

Mamah cleared her throat and tried to change the subject. “Frank told me your father settled this land.”

Anna looked up from her work and gazed past Mamah’s face again. “My father…” She paused, as if deciding whether to sully her father’s story by telling it to Mamah. “My father had nothing when he came here.” Her head was shaking a little, as if palsied by indignation. “
Nothing.
Except a wife and passel of children who could work. They were driven out of Wales by religious persecution.”

“They were Unitarian preachers, weren’t they?”

“You couldn’t live by just that. The Lloyd Joneses were farmers, some of them. A hatmaker, my father was. Great men. Brilliant men. But they were misunderstood back in Wales, treated like heretics by their own people. Because they weren’t afraid to think for themselves. My father was forced to leave the village church because he questioned the divinity of Christ. Most doctrines can’t abide questioners. And my father opened his mouth. He spoke what he believed.” She shook her head. “Oh, the persecution he and Mother endured.”

“So they left,” Mamah said.

“My father had a sister in Wisconsin. At first all we had was our hands and backs. One baby didn’t make it—died on the trip out here from New York.” Anna was washing the blood from the apron in cold water. “In time the Lloyd Joneses owned this whole valley.”

Anna went out of the kitchen, leaving the big pot steaming.

THERE WAS NO REASON
to expect Frank’s mother to ever come around. Mamah remembered Catherine’s story of her wedding day. Anna Wright had behaved as if she were at a funeral, fainting during the ceremony. She’d been at constant odds with her daughter-in-law ever since. Yet she had stayed near Frank the whole time. When he set off from Wisconsin as a young man to seek his fortune in Chicago, Anna had followed him within a year or so, moving with her two daughters to live nearby. Actually, to be supported by him.

He’d built a house for her on Chicago Avenue next door to his own. She had settled into Oak Park and carved out a life for herself as Madame Wright, mother of the brilliant architect.

It occurred to Mamah that Frank had never been without his mother close by, except for the one year in Europe. For all the adoration Frank enjoyed in his family, he’d been a beast of burden since he was nineteen or twenty. Standing in the kitchen peeling potatoes, Mamah could easily piece together how things had unfolded recently. Anna Wright had come up here and bought this land for Frank because she knew him well enough to see that he wasn’t going to stay with Catherine. Where would that leave her, living next door to the daughter-in-law he had left behind? No, the mother had to throw her lot in with the son once more, out of loyalty, surely, but also because she had no other options.

To judge by what Mamah could glean from Frank’s meager details, Anna Wright had made a bad bet in the one big gamble of her life. When she’d married, she had settled on a widowed preacher with a charming personality and a gift for music. Anna had ended up sending away his children to live with their dead mother’s family once she had her own children with William Wright. But Frank’s father turned out to be a rambling man, skipping across the country from one low-paying congregation to the next. One day when she’d had enough, Anna cut William out of her life. Banished him to an attic bed and stopped taking care of him, prompting him to file for divorce.

How humiliating for a woman like Anna to have to go back to the handouts of her brothers, the ones who owned the land. Following Frank to Chicago, Anna traded one kind of dependency for another. Now, once again, she was in the valley of the God-Almighty Joneses.

Maybe Anna was finding some respite up here after the newspaper scandal. Mamah had seen Anna’s letters to Frank, knew how deeply pained she had been by the public humiliation. To return to her family’s beloved valley, this time owning a piece of it—at least Frank owning a piece of it—must have restored a little dignity for her. And with Jennie only a stone’s throw away, she must have felt satisfaction in at last laying claim to a part of the Jones dynasty.

Back in Berlin, listening to Frank conjure up images of life at Taliesin, Mamah had not inserted Anna Wright into the picture. Now it dawned on her that Madame Wright could be a very present fact in her life, once Taliesin was completed.

WHEN ANNA APPEARED
in the kitchen to check on the stew, Mamah tried again. “Frank says you are the one who really led him to architecture.”

“I put pictures of cathedrals on the walls around his crib,” Anna said. She stirred the steaming pot with a slotted spoon. “And, of course, I introduced him to the Froebel building blocks that he played with growing up.”

Mamah remembered a remark Catherine had made at the housewarming party long ago: “His mother takes credit for his genius. It just burns me up.”

“That’s not the usual thing a mother does,” Mamah said solicitously to Anna. “It was quite enlightened.”

“Well, it certainly wasn’t ordinary in 1867, when he was born, but I had a sense from the beginning that this child saw things other people didn’t.”

“Did you say 1867?”

“Yes. In Richland Center.”

Mamah did not press her, but Frank had said he was born in 1869. She studied the woman’s face.
Anna must be at least seventy-five,
she thought.
It’s possible she’s entering senility; that would explain her constant crankiness.
Mamah remembered the onset of her grandmother’s forgetfulness, the confusion of time and dates, the bursts of temper. In that moment she felt some tenderness for Anna Wright.

CHAPTER
36

September 1911

F
rank Wright—what a joy and a puzzle you are. Evenings and mornings I catch you sitting on the window seat, studying the valley. I know what you are doing. You’re observing the progression of colors as the leaves change. You’re thinking about plum trees and vineyards. About cows on the hillsides. Which ones are the most picturesque? We can’t have just any cows at Taliesin. Oh my, no. “Only black and white Holsteins against these emerald hills,” you tell me.

The next moment you are up on your feet, dragging me down to the river. Never mind dinner. Let’s go fishing. You pull up two fish and you are twelve again.

By day you dash around here looking like a country squire who has fallen into a pig trough. You sashay out into the middle of construction in your suit, just off the train from Chicago. When you should dress up, you don’t. A couple of weeks ago, when we drove into Spring Green, you actually went into the bank barefoot. I sat in the car, trying to go unnoticed, while you went to see your banker dressed as Huck Finn.

Was that a test? To see if I have the stuff to ride the raft with you? Or were you simply pushing up against the rules because you feel more alive when you have a foe to fight?

You are in the middle of reliving every boyhood fantasy you ever had, Frank. You’ve told me time and again about sitting on this hill after your uncle had worked you near to death in the fields, and dreaming about building a house right in this place. Well, you have done it. You’ve proven yourself.

One of these days I will find the courage to say to you what I write here. That you don’t have to test the loyalty of the people in this place. You are already testing sorely the love of your family by coming here with me. Let us live shoed lives for a while.

Frank was pacing around the kitchen, holding a flyswatter. His eyes followed a large black fly as it circled the kitchen table, then landed on a leftover piece of toast.

“Griffin!” Frank shouted, whacking the fly with such ferocity that the plate slid across the table and would have fallen off had he not grabbed it just in time. He took a moment to swipe the dead fly onto the plate, collect the toast from the floor, and toss the mess into the garbage. In the blink of an eye, he was leaping through the air, hollering, “Harriet Monroe!” Whack. The swatter came down on the kitchen window. When he lifted it, a fat black smudge remained on the glass.

“What has Harriet Monroe ever done to you?” Mamah asked.

“She wrote a nasty review in the
Tribune.
”

“You didn’t mention it. When?”

“Four years ago.” Frank was creeping toward a cabinet speckled with flies. “William Drummond!” he muttered. Smack. “Elmslie. Purcell.” Smack. Smack. He knocked over a chair while dispatching the last two flies, named for former draftsmen she’d heard him mention in moments of despair—men he once trusted who now copied his work.

“I’m going into town.”

Frank stopped his swatting. “What prompts your recklessness, my dear?”

“Your mother. I’m going to take Lil the five dollars we owe her, and hopefully talk her into coming back, because I really don’t want to do this cooking job by myself.”

Frank put down the swatter and walked over to her. He stood behind Mamah and rubbed her shoulders. “She lives above the general store,” he said, kissing her ear. “Will you get a couple of other things?”

“Give me a list and some money.”

Frank scribbled down a few items on a scrap of paper. He reached into his right pocket and pulled out its contents in handfuls. Crumpled together were dollar bills, envelopes, old uncashed checks, a couple of pencils, and an eraser. He flattened out four five-dollar bills. “Is this enough?”

“It should be. I’ll buy some groceries, too.”

Mamah put on her sun hat and climbed into the car. It was the autumn equinox and still blazing hot. Black flies swirled outside as the workmen began to arrive at the house.

“CAN YOU TELL ME
how I can find Lil Sullivan?” Mamah asked. She was standing in front of the fabric counter when the owner appeared.

“Just go around back and climb up the steps,” he said. “She should be there.”

When Lil answered the door, she was wearing a rumpled robe. Somewhere in the background, a child was crying. She looked stunned to find Mamah standing there.

“I want to apologize to you. I should have gotten here sooner to give you this money, but…Well, here it is.” Mamah handed her the five.

“Thank you.”

“You shouldn’t have been treated the way you were that day. I should have spoken up, and I haven’t forgiven myself for not doing it. I was thinking, Lil, if you came back—if you were willing to come back—I would do my best to keep her out of the kitchen. I will speak to Mr. Wright about it, and we will find a way.”

“Who is that?” A man’s voice came from somewhere inside the apartment.

“I can come back,” Lil said. “Is tomorrow all right?”

“Tomorrow is wonderful. Tomorrow is perfect. Thank you.”

Mamah felt so elated, she nearly forgot to stop downstairs to buy supplies. She waited her turn behind a couple of farmers who were discreet enough not to stare at a new face in the store. When it was her turn, she handed over the list Frank had scribbled—so many pounds of black galvanized nails, lengths of pipe, and other jottings the nature of which she couldn’t interpret. The man went in the back and returned with the supplies.

“Do you have an account with us, ma’am?” He was a big man with deep, vertical furrows in his long face.

“We do.” The store was now blessedly empty. “It’s the account of Frank Lloyd Wright.” She held her breath and looked at the man straight on. If he had heard about “the woman” out at Taliesin living with Frank, he did not betray it. He turned his back to her, bent down to get out his account book, opened it, then pointed to a page titled
WRIGHT, F
.

“Mr. Wright owes money on his account,” he said. His attitude cooled. “He paid half of his balance in June and has not paid the rest since. He owes fifty-eight dollars.”

Mamah’s eyes began to burn. “I’ll just get the supplies another day,” she said. She took out the remaining fifteen dollars Frank had given her, added to the money the few dollars of her own she was carrying, and handed them over to the man. “We shall get the other forty to you promptly,” she said. She walked out of the store and kept her head bent as she climbed into the car.

Behind the steering wheel, Mamah slowly drove out of town. When she got to the county road, she pressed the pedal to the floor and constructed one withering sentence after another to deliver to Frank when she got home.

As she pulled into the driveway, she saw him and the workmen crouched around something, probably plans. When she got closer, she saw that they were circled around an array of eggs, standing, every last one of them, on end.

“Mamah!” Frank called out when he saw her. “You’re just in time. This only lasts for a short while.”

The carpenters and plasterers stood around the eggs with grins on their faces, feeling a little silly, perhaps, but clearly delighted by Frank’s artful spin on the old equinox trick. For he had taken the time to decorate every egg in its own complex geometrical pattern with colored pencils. The results were dazzling; the eggs looked like brilliant, faceted jewels.

“How often is the world in perfect balance, gentlemen?” Frank said. “Enjoy it.”

“I don’t believe you!” she said when she had him alone. “To experience that kind of humiliation and then to come home…” She threw up her arms in exasperation. “What were you thinking, sending me to the general store when you knew you owed them money?”

Frank shrugged. “Look, help me. I’m terrible at the business part of this thing.”

“I won’t live this way, Frank. You have to pay your bills. The
whole
bill.
Every
bill. Or just pay cash.”

“I do. Often.”

“And if you can’t afford it, then
don’t buy it.
”

“We have to get this place closed in before winter,” he said. “I need the supplies, and I need them now.”

“I would rather freeze than buy things on credit.”

“Look, if you’re willing to, you can take over the bill paying.” He was scratching his back against the door frame.

“Will you sit down, please, and talk to me?”

He sank into a chair.

“Frank, this is no way to start things up here, I’m telling you. There are people who
want
us to fail.”

“I know,” he said, “I know.”

She pulled a chair up and sat with her knees nearly touching his. “Let’s not give them the satisfaction. What do you say?”

He lowered his eyes.

“And something else.”

Frank shifted in his chair, as if he knew he would be held there for a while.

“Lil is coming back.”

“Congratulations. How did you do that?”

“I told her your mother would not be coming into the kitchen.”

He bent his head and put a thumb and forefinger over his closed eyes. “Shall I put Mother in charge of cow roping?” He sighed when he looked up. “Or hay stacking?”

“I’m serious. Would you arrange for her to keep away from Lil?”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“I’m not done.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said boyishly.

“Frank.” She hesitated. “What year were you born?”

“Ah, Mamah.” Frank fell against the back of the chair he was sitting on and threw up his hands in a “caught me” gesture. “1867.” There was some defiance in his voice.

“You told me you were born the same year I was, 1869.”

“And there it is,” he said.

“What do you mean, ‘And there it is’?”

“I was a man in love. What can I say? It was a soul confession. I thought that finding you was damn near miraculous. Still think so. It didn’t seem such a big…”

“Lie?”

“I just said it. I didn’t think about it before it came out, and you seemed so happy about it. I felt that even though it wasn’t precisely true, it
should
be true.”

So odd an untruth,
she thought when she was alone. About something so inconsequential. Yet it wasn’t the first time she had caught him in a lie or distortion. He romanticized things. He couldn’t resist enlarging his clients into heroes and heroines, making them gallant figures in his own King Arthur–size imagination. Today, out in the courtyard, he had been Merlin, dazzling the men with a show of magic. He loved imbuing everything with a little drama. It made life so much more interesting.

It was hard to get angry with Frank Wright. Somehow she would have to find a way to make him understand that there was no need to exaggerate anything. That he was extraordinary enough already.