Loving Frank (29 page)

She carried it back to their bedroom and laid it out on the bed. On any other Christmas morning, she would have put it on to please him. And to please herself, really. She hesitated, then held it up and viewed herself in front of the long closet mirror. In the space of a few seconds, she was pulling off her dress and wrapping the kimono around herself.

In the kitchen she made two pots of coffee, briefly considered biscuits, and then thought better of it. She was not willing to stoop that low.

Frank sat at the table while she prepared oatmeal, poring over the Christmas Day newspapers Jennie’s husband, Andrew, had brought from the Spring Green train station that morning. “Thank God for Mrs. Upton Sinclair,” he said. “She’s knocked us off the front page.”

Mamah looked over his shoulder. There was a portrait of the unfortunate woman next to a headline that read,
AFFINITY OF POET DECLARES SHE WANTS ONLY FREEDOM IN HER ACTIONS
. Mamah cringed at the word affinity. The yellow journals had turned a lovely word into a weapon—a code for “ridiculous whore.”

“Atta girl,” Frank muttered.

“What is it?”

“She let ’em have it. Listen. ‘ “I don’t give a d—about marriage, divorce, reports of courts or the findings of referees,” declared Mrs. Upton Sinclair, wife of the novelist. “I am so exhausted by the worries of the divorce suit that I have decided to live my own life with Harry Kemp as I see fit. Here we are hid away in a little insignificant bungalow, away from the outside world…. It is here in the wilds with our sacred feelings in perfect accord….” ’” Frank looked up at Mamah. “Dear God, did all these hack writers go to the same lousy school?”

“No one talks like that,” Mamah said. “No one says, ‘Here we are hid away in a little insignificant bungalow.’”

“Didn’t you know? All affinities talk alike. And they all live in bungalows. It’s the only way the editors will have it.”

“I think she’s made a mistake.”

“Mrs. Sinclair?”

“To come out swinging like that. I understand it, but there’s a more dignified way.” Mamah went and retrieved the notes they had composed the night before. “Do it as we said, darling, will you?” she said, handing him the paper.

“I’m no good at recitation.” He sighed, but when he saw her worried look, he muttered, “All right. I’ll read the darn thing.”

At ten there were six reporters gathered around the fireplace, from papers in Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, and Spring Green. For reporters who were supposed to be fiercely competitive, the men were behaving like old chums. They seemed to have formed a quick camaraderie, the way travelers do when they find themselves thrown together in a strange place. Frank assumed a position in front of them, standing in his long red robe with one arm propped on the hearth. When Mamah entered the room, they turned en masse, then jotted madly in their notebooks. Mamah took a chair as Frank began to speak.

“In the first place, I haven’t abandoned my children or deserted any woman, nor have I eloped with any man’s wife. There has been nothing clandestine about this affair in any of its aspects. I have been trying to live honestly. I
have
been living honestly.

“Mrs. E. H. Cheney never existed for me. She was always Mamah Borthwick to me, an individual separate and distinct, who was not any man’s possession.”

Frank glanced toward Mamah, and she nodded in return. He seemed to be in full command of his faculties, almost glad to be in front of an audience.

“The children, my children, are as well provided for as they ever were. I love them as much as any father could, but I suppose I haven’t been a good father to them.

“Certainly, I regard it as a tragedy that things should have come about as they have, but I could not act differently if I had it all to do over again. Mrs. Wright wanted children, loved children, and understood children. She had her life in them. She played with them and enjoyed them. But…I found
my
life in my work.”

Frank set down his notes on the hearth. “You see, I started out to give expression to certain ideals in architecture. I wanted to create something organic—something sound and wholesome. American in spirit and beautiful if might be. I think I have succeeded in that. In a way, my buildings are my children.”

Mamah winced. She knew what he meant, but the newspaper readers would not, she was certain. And how would his children feel, reading it? She cleared her throat. Frank looked over at her, then continued on.

“If I could have put aside the desire to live my life as I build my buildings—from within outward—if I could have persuaded myself that human beings are benefited by the sacrifices others make for them…if I could have
lied
to myself, I might have been able to stay.”

The
Journal
reporter jumped in. “How can you justify leaving when you have children?”

Frank kept his calm. “I believe we can’t be useful to the progress of society without a stubborn selfhood…. I wanted to be honestly myself first and take care of everything else afterward. I can do better by my children now than I could have done had I sacrificed that which was life itself to me. I believe in them, but no parent can live his children’s lives for them. More are ruined that way than saved. I don’t want to be a pattern for them. I want them to have room in which to grow up to be themselves.

“I have taken nothing and shall take nothing from them. My earning capacity is as rightfully at their service as ever. I hope to be something helpful and suggestive of better things to them. When they get a little older, I hope they will see me in another light.”

“And Mrs. Wright?”

“Mrs. Wright has a soul of her own and much greater matters than this to occupy her heart and mind. It’s not for me to say what she may do.”

Frank looked away, thoughtful, then turned his face to the men again. “Look,” he said, “it will be a waste of something socially precious if this thing robs me of my work. I have struggled to express something
real
in American architecture. I have something to give. It will be a misfortune if the world decides not to receive what I have to give.

“As for the general aspect of this thing, I want to say this: Laws and rules are made for the average man.”

Mamah stood up abruptly. She knew what was coming next. She tried to get his attention, but Frank kept talking.

“The ordinary man cannot live without rules to guide his conduct. It is infinitely more difficult to live
without
rules, but that is what the really honest, sincere, thinking man is compelled to do. And I think when a man has displayed some spiritual power, has given concrete evidence of his ability to see and to feel the
higher
and
better
things of life, we ought to go slow in deciding that he has acted badly.”

Mamah glared at him. Had he not heard what she’d said to him this morning? That nothing made better copy than someone who thinks himself more important than the common man? It was like throwing meat to lions.

“That’s all I care to say to you, gentlemen,” he said when she finally caught his eye. “If you want to see what I have done here, I’ll take you around Taliesin.”

While Frank went to change his clothes, the men stood waiting in the foyer. She could tell he was keeping them waiting on purpose, probably to prevent them from making their deadlines. Mamah collected coffee cups and stood on the other side of the wall to listen.

At first they didn’t speak, and then she heard their schoolboy snickers. She stood frozen, listening. She heard “kimono” and “red” as their titters escalated to choked laughter.

Mamah hurried out into the kitchen.

“I thought the interview went rather well,” Frank said quietly to her when he appeared at last.

She looked at him standing there with his regal bearing in the suit he had designed for himself. She saw him then as the reporters had viewed him—an eccentric figure of a man, all too self-serious. She knew at that moment that they would not be spared.

“Just get rid of them,” she said.

CHAPTER
39

T
he morning of December 26 began with a gaggle of reporters at the gate. Josiah brought in the newspapers that the men had shoved at him when he arrived. Mamah skimmed down, pausing at the hurtful parts.

Apparently Mr. Wright did not feel any regret he was not present in the Oak Park house where his lawful wife and their six children were spending their Christmas and Mamah Borthwick seemed to have forgotten the Christmases of the past which she had spent with her husband and children.

“What do you want us to do?” Josiah asked.

“Ignore the mutts and go on with your work,” Frank said. “And do not talk to them, do you understand? Tell all the men that I said so.”

“Yes, sir.”

“On second thought, escort the lot of them out of here.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mamah stood up to watch Josiah approach the reporters. He opened the gate and spoke to them. After a while, he took to feinting and lunging forward like a boxer before he closed the gate and retreated, looking fiercely frustrated. The men climbed on their horses and rode down the driveway only to dismount at the entrance from the road to Taliesin.

When the phone rang, she answered it cautiously. It was Jennie, saying that some reporters had already been to her house and over to Hillside School to besiege Frank’s aunts as they began classes. Aunt Jennie and Aunt Nell were frantic and begging Frank to come immediately to Hillside.

Frank had dressed that morning in his riding clothes and saddled his horse, intent on getting some fresh air. He mounted Champion and rode the mile to the school. When he returned an hour later, he was wild with anger. “They’re terrified. They had parents show up this morning, threatening to pull their children out of the school if something isn’t settled.”

“Do you think—”

“Yes, I think it could happen. Aunt Jenny and Nell’s finances are shaky anyway. They’re trying to buy back the school from Uncle Jenk. He bailed them out when they went bankrupt a couple of years ago, but this could be the end of everything for them.” Frank turned around and headed out the door again.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to find the gun.”

“
What
gun?”

“I have a rifle somewhere. In the shed, I think.”

Mamah went to her study and looked out the window. The cluster of men out near the entrance had grown, and a party of them was mounting their horses. She watched in horror as they headed up the driveway toward the house. She ran out to the shed, where she found Frank trying to put together a disassembled old firearm.

“If you love me, Frank, you will keep your head. Listen to me—put that thing back in the box.”

“Oh, hell, Mamah, the damn thing doesn’t work anyway.”

“Just come into the house with me. The reporters are headed up here again.”

Frank leaped to his feet, grabbed his battered old Stetson off a hook, and charged out of the shed. He placed himself in front of the gate, arms folded. “Get out of here, you boobs,” he shouted when they were in earshot.

The reporters kept coming. When they reached him, they appeared to be pleading their case to Frank. Mamah stood outside the kitchen door, straining to hear their words. “If you continue to intrude on me,” she heard him shout, “I shall have only one recourse, and that is my revolver.” He turned on his heel and came back to the house.

“We’ve got big problems,” he said when he slipped into the kitchen. “They say people in Spring Green are up in arms, and somebody has filed a complaint with the sheriff. They’re telling me Pengally over in Dodgeville is coming here to arrest me.”

Mamah steadied herself by holding on to a chair back.

“Let him come,” Frank said, furiously scratching the back of his neck. He paced around the kitchen, red-faced. “There’s not a chance in hell he’s going to arrest anybody.”

“You have a revolver, too?” Mamah asked.

“Of course not,” Frank said. “I haven’t even got a decent slingshot.”

They retreated into the bedroom. She climbed under the bedcovers, shaking. Frank had let the fires go out.

“You see what they did, don’t you?” he said. “They wrote their stories, ran to the train station to wire them to their editors yesterday, then went straight to goading the Iowa County sheriff to do something. One of them told me a petition was going around, trying to get us to leave. Now, who do you think started the goddamn petition? One of those asses outside right now, that’s who. They’re making money hand over fist on us because
we
sell their papers.
We
are the fodder in their circulation wars.”

“There’s enough food in the house to stay in here for a few days.” She shivered. “If we don’t go out, they will go away.”

He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his head hanging. “My family has lived in this valley for fifty years. My aunts…”

She shook his shoulders. “Frank,” she said gently. “Frank. Have you talked to Sheriff Pengally yourself?”

“No.”

“Then call him right now, for goodness’ sake.”

LATER, WHEN SHE REMEMBERED
these days, she would think of Josiah, lunging and feinting, lunging and feinting. It was the same dance she and Frank had been drawn into as they attempted to make the men disappear. Each day a new development caused one side to retreat, only to lunge forward the next day with some new ploy or response. Pengally confirmed by phone that reporters had been nagging him. They had gone after the district attorney to search the state statutes, but the harried man found nothing to put before a grand jury. “Don’t worry,” the sheriff told Frank, “I’ll shoo them off.” Yet the headlines persisted.
SOUL HEGIRA HEADS TOWARD SORDID JAIL
. Another called Taliesin a “love jungle.” Another claimed a posse had raided “F. L. Wright’s Den of Love.”

There had been no posse after all. At the time, though, not even the men who worked for Frank knew whether to believe a posse was headed toward Taliesin. During the worst of it, the workmen had brought firearms from home and taken it upon themselves to patrol the perimeter of the property. The thought of these loyal country men, whose lives were rooted in family and church, trying to protecting her and Frank had made Mamah feel grateful and, at the same time, deeply embarrassed.

In despair, Frank wrote another public statement of their position, passed it to the press, then announced that he would ask Catherine and Edwin for a “family caucus” to sign an agreement that everyone was at peace with the situation. The day before New Year’s, as he was preparing to go to Oak Park to get their signatures, the morning newspaper rendered the trip unnecessary. Catherine Wright made it very clear that she knew nothing of a caucus and had no intention of signing anything. “I shall not divorce my husband,” she said, “and I shall not allow him to marry another. He will always be welcome in his home; I shall always be glad to see him.”

Mamah hadn’t heard Catherine’s voice for some time, but this sounded like the woman she once knew. The statement, Mamah felt certain, was meant for her. It dawned on her that the newspapers had become a messenger service between them.

Once again she found herself a character in a morality play, cast by the dailies and watched by the public. Nowhere was that more evident than in an interview with Frank’s former secretary, Grace Majors, that ran the next day. She described Catherine as a woman of not only extraordinary character but great beauty. Radiantly lovely with pink and white coloring, Catherine looked particularly stunning in a chiffon gown Frank had designed for her that matched her auburn hair. When people complimented her on her appearance, according to the secretary, Catherine always said, “The credit for the beauty of this gown is all due Mr. Wright.”

Miss Majors did not remark on Mamah’s looks but did dismiss her as a devotee of Ibsen, whom Mamah regarded as her spiritual and physical director. That part caused Mamah to laugh bitterly. She’d never met the secretary. True, she had read some Ibsen, but to describe him as her spiritual and physical director? What did that even mean?

But it didn’t have to mean anything for readers to catch the message of the article.
Catherine is the angel,
Mamah thought.
And I am the devil.

For a full week the newspaper scandal raged on. A few parents took their children out of Hillside School for fear they would be tainted by the nearness of Taliesin. Clergymen of every stripe from Madison to Chicago railed against Frank and Mamah from their pulpits. The church Mamah had attended in Oak Park dropped her from its rolls.

In the early part of the siege, the reporters had placed the latest papers outside their door, like bait. She and Frank had taken in the papers each day. The reporters got what they wanted—a distressed response that ran the following day.

Now that the workmen were patrolling the property, the papers had stopped appearing. Frank was relieved, but she missed them. Maybe Mrs. Upton Sinclair was strong enough to refuse to read the dailies, but Mamah couldn’t stop herself. The articles were saturated with distortions, but there were nuggets of truth in them, too—correct chronologies, real quotes.

She asked Josiah to bring her any Chicago papers he could get from the train station. He looked at her mournfully. “They’re full of lies,” she said, “but it would be worse to not know what’s being said.”

ON JANUARY
3, a bitter cold seized southwest Wisconsin. They woke to find Lucky’s bowl of water frozen solid in the kitchen. Dressed in layers of wool, Frank cursed the useless furnace and went out to get more wood. She watched through the window as he bent down, gathered snow in his hands, and washed his face with it. He collected an armful of logs, came inside, then started up the stove and built a roaring fire in the living room.

She kept the oven door open until her fingers could function properly. Sitting in the kitchen, Mamah took stock. The stove had unwiped spills on it. In the living room, she’d noticed footprints through gray ashes all around the fireplace. The sheets needed to be changed and the bathroom scrubbed.

When she felt warm enough, she opened the door to see that Josiah had left her a newspaper. They had not had any press for two days, and she’d begun to believe the assault was over. But there in the middle column of the
Chicago Journal
’s front page, some editor had fired his parting shot.

HEGIRA TEARS CHILD HEARTS

M
RS.
C
HENEY’S
O
FFSPRING
P
RAY

S
HE
M
AY
R
ETURN,

B
UT
O
NLY
O
NE
H
AS
H
OPE

Mamah dropped the paper on the kitchen table, crossed her arms, and squeezed her ribs as she read down the column.

The three children of Edwin H. Cheney and Mamah Bouton Borthwick, his divorced wife, have given up hope of having their mother again.

“I guess she is not coming back,” said 9-year-old John today as he plodded from his home to the Holmes School in Oak Park.

“Us three kids pray for her every night, but I guess God can’t hear us, or something, for none of us except Martha believes she will come back.

“Jessie and I have read a lot about her in the newspapers whenever we get a chance, but they keep them away from us most of the time, and there is a lot of it we don’t understand. Martha is too young to read the papers, so she just keeps wishing for Mamma. She talks about her nearly all the time.”

Mamah’s anguished cry brought Frank in from the living room. He read down the column and said, “They’ve made it up. It’s hard to imagine such cruelty, but they’ve put words in John’s mouth.”

“How do you know that?”

“Does he speak like that?”

She looked at him fearfully. “No, but there are some things right in it. The name of Holmes School.”

Mamah read one section after another.
CHILDREN TAUNT LITTLE CHENEYS. CHENEY CHILDREN GAIN LOVE OF THEIR AUNT
. “They talked to Lizzie,” she said.