Loving Frank (30 page)

“Now I
know
it’s made up,” Frank said. “She’s never talked to anyone.”

“Read this.” Mamah pointed to a section on the second page, where her portrait once again loomed midpage.

MAMAH BRILLIANT AS A CHILD

“There is really nothing to say,” declared Miss Borthwick. “I educated my sister, I still love her—I couldn’t help doing that; nobody could, because everybody who knows her loves her. And I will be a mother to her children. Mr. Cheney never has uttered a word against his former wife, even to his closest friends, and if he does not condemn her, why should I?

“Mamah was always brilliant, even as a little child, and was mistress of three languages at an age when some children can scarcely construct a correct sentence in their own language. I taught school and paid for her education at Ann Arbor.”

Frank looked up. “Is that true?”

“Yes,” Mamah said, pressing her fingers into her flesh.

“She graduated from that institution with honors. Later Mamah became librarian at Port Huron. She was regarded not only as brilliant, but as one of the best-read women in America and an efficient librarian. But there isn’t anything to say.

“All I can do is the woman’s part—that is, do my duty, love and care for my unhappy, misguided sister’s little boy and girl and help them fill the aching void left there to both Mr. Cheney and the children by the absence of the mother.”

“Words in her mouth,” Frank said. “Don’t finish it.”

When he tried to take away the paper, Mamah grabbed it tight and held on. For a moment there was an angry tug-of-war, until Frank let go. Sighing, he walked back into the living room while she read and reread the terrible story.

No, Lizzie didn’t talk that way. But some parts were things only Lizzie and a few others knew. Three languages by kindergarten. That Lizzie had helped pay Mamah’s way through graduate school. And the comment about being well-read. What was missing was the familiar remark Lizzie always added: “So why can’t you remember where you put your glasses?”

Mamah got up and banged pots around in the sink. She could imagine the taunts the children had suffered. For John to have his mother portrayed on the front page as a whore was the cruelest thing she could think of. Children could be hideous on the playground. What did her own pain amount to, compared to what John and Martha and Jessie had endured?

At that moment, if she could have, she would have taken one of the workmen’s guns and shot dead the reporter who had tracked John down to poke at his wounds.

She remembered the moment when they were in Canada, when she had tried to explain to John what divorce meant. He had squirmed out of her arms and slipped away to play. That was the thing about children. Even if John had nodded, even if he had said he understood, he wouldn’t have.
He is nine years old,
she thought.
All he knows is the feeling inside himself, the terrible longing. What could the word “divorce” really mean to a child that young? Or to Martha?
The image of the girl waiting, hoping, believing, was horrifying to Mamah. What must it be like for Martha to bear?

She wanted to leap on the next train to Chicago, to hold her children in her arms. She wanted to tell Martha and Jessie over and over that everything would be all right. She was desperate to feel John’s warm, skinny body, to stroke his head and let him know that he meant everything, more than the world itself, to her.

Mamah stood at the kitchen window and considered the driveway. It was a sheet of ice. The car would surely not start. It was too cold and slippery to try to make any real distance on horseback.

But if she did go, if she found a way to get there, who would it serve?

Only me.

She understood something new just then. That the greatest measure of her love would be to leave them alone. To rush back to Oak Park would be to poke her own stick in their wounds, because once the reunion was over, she would leave again. What they needed now, in order to heal, was distance from her and all this drama. They needed a normal household and the steady, present love of Edwin and Louise and Lizzie. And Elinor Millor.

Mamah saw clearly now just what she had lost. She had given up her right to keep her place as the children’s most beloved. The small, daily offices of love that had connected her to the children before—the shoe tying, the hair combing, the nightly storytelling—were no longer hers to claim. How dare she seek from them the comfort that had once so nourished her? To keep them yearning for a mother who was rarely with them, through her own choice, would be to sentence them to whole lifetimes of sorrow.

What she had to do was secure for them some sense of privacy so they could begin to accept that she was not coming home. She would not inflict herself upon them in the flesh. To go see them now, even if she could, would be to visit the press upon them once more.

Instead, she could write to them and pour out her love for them in letters. She could ask their forgiveness. She could try once more to explain. Words lasted longer on paper than when they were spoken into a child’s ear.
Someday,
she prayed,
someday when they are grown, let them understand.

CHAPTER
40

M
amah sat in her study with the new translation of the
Taliesin
poem on her lap. She had ordered the book months ago as a Christmas gift for Frank. But it had arrived only yesterday, and Christmas was an agonizing memory she preferred not to think of.

It was February, yet she felt they were both still tender as new bruises. Frank had been right. Clients and prospects had fallen away in the wake of the newspaper stories. He had spent a good deal of time since December writing letters to those whose projects were on the drawing board, urging them to stay with him.

To her, he’d shown a despair she’d never seen in him. In the worst of the onslaught, he had entertained the fear that he might actually die at the hands of lynchers. At the end of December, Frank had taken out a fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy, naming Mamah as the beneficiary. He’d talked of it in terms of protecting her, but there was also another part of it, a deep sense of doom—the flipped-over side of his powerful sense of destiny as an artist.

Mamah read a passage of the poem.

I was a hero in trouble:

I was a great current on the slopes:

I was a boat in the destructive spread of the flood:

I was a captive on the cross…

The words would only darken Frank’s outlook. Mamah closed the volume and put it on her shelf. She had to be careful. Maybe in a couple of months she would give it to him. Now it would only cause him to fall deeper into depression.

“I can’t sit around and design indefinitely,” he said more than once during the long days of February. “There are mouths to feed.” He would go out and split wood until he couldn’t lift his arms anymore, then come back inside, still furious.

He needed to build, he would say, slamming more logs into a pile in the living room. Who
was
he otherwise? He had to have partners in his work, people who would pay for the materials of his art, who would provide themselves and their dreams as material to inspire him. To lose clients meant so much more than losing income. It meant the loss of an essential dynamic. He would continue to design; he couldn’t really stop himself. But to build, to interact with a place and its materials, to make the decisions along the way that breathed life into a space…

It will be a misfortune if the world decides not to receive what I have to give.
She was haunted by the words he’d said to the reporters.

At night he brooded aloud in front of the fire, gauging the loyalty of old clients. Darwin Martin. The Littles. The Coonleys. People who’d had the courage in the past to dream along with Frank. They meant more than money to him. They were the true believers, former and current. Now, in his troubled evenings, he tallied his enemies and friends.

“I should have listened to my instincts,” Mamah told him one night. The dog lay on top of her feet beside the fireplace.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Frank said when he saw that she’d brought table scraps from dinner and was sneaking bits of beef to the dog. “He has a bowl.”

“I blame myself.”

Frank waved away the remark. “I thought you believed that woman’s intuition was fiction, anyway.”

She did. The expression annoyed her, as if women didn’t use intelligence and experience—just as men did—to make wise decisions. Frank, even Edwin, had accused her of thinking a thing to death. But sometimes she just listened to her instincts. This time she wished she had listened to what they were telling her: Lock the door and don’t talk. She’d encouraged Frank to speak openly to the newspapermen, then watched in horror as he stepped into a perverse dance with the press. It was as if he couldn’t stop himself once the thing had begun. In the end, it was he who had been made a fool of, more than she.

There was nothing to be done about it. The past month had been a nightmare she wanted to forget. Only one shred of good had come of it. When Anna had returned from Oak Park, she’d taken up residence at her daughter Jennie’s house rather than with Frank and Mamah.

“What is happening at the office?” Mamah asked him.

“Well, Sherman hasn’t given up on me. He’s going ahead with the house in Glencoe. There are a couple of stalwarts left. Fred is sending out the monograph to the booksellers who ordered it, but it’s very slow-going.” Fred was the office manager in Chicago. She wondered how Frank managed to pay the rent at Orchestra Hall, let alone the young architect, given all his other financial obligations.

“And the children?” she asked him. He had not mentioned them since he’d come back.

“They still hate me some.”

She suspected he was meting out in doses the time he spent with them or reflected on them. It was how she got through a day. To take John’s and Martha’s letters out of her secretary whenever she felt the impulse was too dangerous. She would exist as a useless heap on the floor if she did.

“When do you see them now?”

“It depends on how you mean ‘see.’ In a week I might visit with them once.” He fell quiet.

“Yes?” She put her hand over his on the armrest.

“But there have been times…at night, when it’s dark…I take the train out to Oak Park.”

She waited, listened to the wet wood hiss in the grate.

“The lights are always on, and if I stand on the terrace, I can see them through the windows. Llewellyn and Frances, they’re such wild little things. They’re usually running around. Sometimes I just go stand there and watch them.” He shook his head and fell silent.

OUTSIDE THE WINDOW
of her study, the February sky was dove gray. Nothing moved. Even the dry grasses poking up through the snow had ceased shivering in the wind. They were stooped over, frozen stiff by the last ice storm. She put on her glasses and scanned the landscape. Where were the hares she had seen in profusion last fall? Dreaming in their holes, she supposed.

Sitting at her desk, she had a clear view to the south and west; she could see who was coming and going. Now it was only workmen or Jennie’s family. Still, it was a useful thing, to command a long view. She thought again of the fortresslike houses on the hills around Siena, situated so that no enemy could approach without being seen.

Had Frank suspected that they would come under siege? Had he thought of Taliesin as some sort of fortress? The idea seemed utterly contrary to the openness of the place. A year ago, when he had appeared in Berlin so full of passion about building Taliesin, he had understood something she hadn’t comprehended at that point. He had gotten a mouthful of the intractable hatred some people felt for him. No wonder he was so adamant about starting to build
right then.
He couldn’t have seen ahead to the cruelty of the past couple of months. But he had prepared for it nonetheless.

At least we have heat now,
she thought. It was a vast improvement. A real gift, actually. Heat was something people took for granted until it suddenly wasn’t there. What did a person need to survive? Food. Water. Shelter. Warmth in cold weather. Those simple things were helping both of them heal.

And something else—books. In January Frank had hired Josiah to build bookshelves for Mamah’s new study. The young man was working on a job elsewhere but had come out to Taliesin evenings and weekends until the shelves were finished. She had unpacked her books, dusting and arranging them by subject and author on the beautiful new shelves, all the while thinking about what volumes she could buy when she had a little money. She arranged in a row her journals, scribbled edge to edge with thoughts and quotes, and stuffed fat with slips of papers on which she’d copied more thoughts and quotes. She’d barely had time to dip into her subscription magazines, sent in care of Frank’s sister Jennie during the past half year. Now they were piled neatly in a basket—six months’ worth of thought on women’s issues, as well as fiction stories, waiting to be savored like expensive chocolates.

There was almost no money. But the pleasure of sitting among the gold-lettered spines in the company of George Eliot, Ibsen, Shakespeare, Plato, Emerson, Freud, and Emma Goldman brought some relief.

Frank had found his own kind of relief. When he was not in Chicago, he was at Taliesin with her, but his mind was somewhere in the countryside beyond Kyoto, wandering over bridges and through the snowy mountains of Hiroshige landscapes. He would go into the vault, take out the prints, and pore over them in his studio, rising from time to time to crank up his Victrola and listen to the structured clarity of Mozart or Bach. The prints and music were better than nerve medicine for him.

“You should write about Japanese art,” she told him one evening. They were seated once more in front of the fireplace. His resting spot was a Morris chair with wide, flat armrests; hers was smaller in scale, with the back and arms upholstered in old wine-colored velvet. “You’re an expert by now,” she went on. “This is a chance to educate other people. You may never again have the time to do it.”

He rubbed the day’s bristly growth on his chin, considering. His face in profile reminded her of a handsome bust of Beethoven—the fine nose and mouth, the thoughtful brow met by a mane of long, backswept hair. In the eight years she had known him, he had grown more handsome, the increasingly gray hair giving him new dignity and power.

“You keep saying you’ll lose money if you sell the prints now—that you have to hold them for a while to make a profit,” she said. “Well, I see another way to make them profitable.
Japonism
is all the rage. Why don’t you write a book about how to understand the Japanese print?”

Within the hour, he had embarked upon the project.

SETTLED AND ORGANIZED,
Mamah returned to her own work. Along with the painful letter Ellen had sent last November, she had included two essays for Mamah to translate. The one Mamah had begun was “Missbrauchte Frauenkraft”—” The Misuse of Woman’s Strength.” Ellen had published it in Sweden seventeen years earlier, in 1895. Mamah knew very little of it. A few pages into translating, she felt a growing sense of unease.

Ellen was arguing that women’s energy should be used for child rearing, that suffragists were wrongheaded to focus so intently on jobs and equal pay when motherhood was their legitimate work. For a woman to rush out seeking men’s work was to abandon her post by the cradle as the shaper of the human race. Far better, Ellen argued, that the emancipators worked toward rewarding and enhancing the job of “mother.”

It was not the first time Mamah had come upon the argument. Ellen had leveled it in
Love and Ethics,
too. But it had not been the main focus.

“She’s taking potshots at suffragists in this ‘Misuse of Woman’s Strength’ essay.” Mamah was frying onions at the stove. Frank sat at the kitchen table, shaving into perfect points the soft lead of his drawing pencils.

“It’s funny,” Mamah said. “I remember when I first met Else at the café in Berlin. One of the women at the table—a woman named Hedwig—called Ellen Key ‘the wise fool of the Woman Movement.’ I was puzzled when she said it, but so much was happening that night…

“About a month later, I ran into Hedwig. I sat down with her in the café and asked her what she had meant. She explained to me that Ellen is revered in Europe for being the champion of the new morality, but she is despised by suffragists for something she did back in 1896. It seems she made a speech to a women’s congress and attacked the whole suffrage movement because she thought they placed equal pay and the vote above the mother function, which she stated is the only truly legitimate work for women. Apparently, the speech sent shock waves throughout Europe. Ellen had loads of devout followers, and the speech turned many of them away from the suffrage cause. Hedwig said she set back the movement in Germany by a decade.”

“Ellen Key?” Frank looked at Mamah incredulously.

“Yes. I guess Ellen came to Berlin a few years after that and endorsed suffrage, but the damage had been done. The movement is still trying to recover from the schism she created.

“And here’s the interesting part. That speech she delivered back in 1896? It was called ‘Missbrauchte Frauenkraft’—‘The Misuse of Woman’s Strength.’ The very document I have on my desk. The very thing she wants me to translate and communicate to the women of America.”

“So you’re afraid if you publish it, it will set back the movement here.”

“Absolutely. I’d love to just throw the thing away, but she clearly wants me to get it out to the public. What amazes me is that she can still believe it in 1912.”

“People have blind spots.”

“But it’s so antithetical to everything she’s written about personal freedom. And she holds some sway now. That’s what I’ve been meaning to tell you. Women are actually reading Ellen Key now.”

“Really? That’s big news. How do you know?”

“From a couple of magazine articles I’ve been reading. It’s astonishing, isn’t it? She’s quite fashionable. All kinds of people are buzzing about her because she’s taken on Charlotte Perkins Gilman over this motherhood-versus-jobs issue. Gilman has always argued that women should be out in the workforce. She has been a major spokeswoman for the suffrage movement for a very long time. But Ellen Key is suddenly the new darling of the literati.”