Loving Frank (32 page)

When she saw the dampness in his eyes, though, she knew he was talking about his own farm. “I’ve never seen her look so pretty,” he said.

  1913  

CHAPTER
42

T
aylor Woolley pulled a drawing from a cardboard tube and spread it out on the drafting table. He smoothed the edges, then set a pencil box on one corner and weighed down the others with things he found around the studio—a T square, a vase. Emil Brodelle, the young draftsman working at the other table, drifted over to have a look.

“‘Villa for an Artist,’” he said, reading aloud the label at the bottom. “I saw this in the portfolio.”

The three of them stood staring at the drawing.

“I see Taliesin in it,” Emil said. “The way it fits into the hill. The terraces, too.”

Mamah smiled at Taylor when they were alone. “You didn’t forget.”

“It was the first thing I packed.”

“I can smell the pines around Fiesole just looking at that drawing,” she said.

“Do you miss it?”

“Oh, I miss the time we had. But I love this place. Isn’t it funny? I hated the idea of Wisconsin, and now all I want to do is stay put.”

“Sink some roots?”

“Deep ones,” she said. “Since we’ve been back from Japan, I look around and see all kinds of things crying out for attention. My garden, for instance. I can’t tell you how good it feels to have a place that needs me.” She rolled up the drawing and put it back in the tube. “Come with me. I want to store this in the vault, and there are some other things to show you.”

She led him to the stone vault in the studio where Frank kept his prize Japanese prints. “Pictures of the floating world,” Mamah said with a little flourish of her hand. Taylor stared, agog, as she opened one box after another. She showed him colorful pictures of Kabuki actors with drawn swords, geishas with parasols, views of snowy Mount Fuji.

“Mr. Wright has transformed himself into a print merchant,” she said.

“I always knew he was wild for the things, but—”

“More than wild. He will have to explain to you their meanings. Oh, how he loves to have a print party. We’ll have one tonight, just the three of us. And he’ll tell you all about every one of these. You’ll wish you hadn’t asked.”

“My stars, there must be a thousand of them.”

“And this is what’s left over. The bulk of them have been shipped off to Boston.”

“He mentioned some collectors.”

“Yes,” she said, closing the vault door. “The Spaulding brothers in Boston. They’re really the reason we could afford to be over there for so long. They gave Frank carte blanche to buy what he saw fit.” She didn’t tell him the dollar amount the brothers had turned over to Frank—twenty-five thousand. The figure would seem preposterous to a young man struggling to get by as an architect. Taylor had come to help Frank prepare drawings for an exhibit, and she was sure he wouldn’t be making much money during his stay.

“Do you want to take a walk around while we wait for Frank? His train gets in about an hour and a half from now.”

“I can’t think of anything better.”

“It was a stroke of luck,” Mamah said as they headed out to the gardens. “We were planning to go to Japan in January anyway, so Frank could talk to government people about the Imperial Hotel. You know that part of the story, right?”

“I heard he was under consideration. It’s a huge commission.”

“Well, it’s still up in the air, but we have very high hopes. It went well on that front. And it couldn’t come at a better time, if it comes.” She stopped walking for a moment and looked Taylor in the eyes. “I hate pretending with you. The truth is, Frank’s work has practically dried up. It seems there’s always something on the drafting table, but when it comes to getting a project built….” Taylor didn’t speak but took her elbow for a moment. He was a young man, Frank’s employee. She shouldn’t be talking to him about money.

“Anyway, these Spauldings got wind that Frank was traveling to Japan. He was going to look for prints anyway. You know him. But suddenly, there was money to spend on behalf of these brothers. It seems Frank is considered something of an expert on Japanese prints.
And
at ferreting them out.” She aimed an amused look at him over her spectacles.

“Quite an adventure you had?” Taylor had a knowing smile on his face. He’d been on a couple of Frank’s shopping sprees in Italy.

“I never knew what the next day would bring,” she said. “One moment we’d be chatting with a print seller in a perfectly dignified office over tea, and the next moment Frank would be disappearing down into smoky basements in the merchant’s quarters—‘go-downs,’ he calls them—where people had stockpiled the most amazing collections of
ukiyo-e
prints. Mind you, these weren’t the pristine pictures we found at the high end. But Frank doesn’t care if the edges are torn or if the prints are dirty. He is absolutely taken with the art and geometry of these things, which I suppose is what makes him so good at choosing them. He says they are more modern than Modernism.”

They sat down on the arc of stone around the tea circle.

“How has it been here?” Taylor might have been inquiring about the weather. Mamah knew he was asking about the press debacle.

“Did you hear about it out there?”

He nodded. “Only through a friend in Chicago. I didn’t read any of it myself. It wasn’t news in Salt Lake.”

Mamah sighed. “Thank you, Taylor.” She patted his hand. “People have been surprisingly generous. No one mentions it. Those who speak to us, that is.”

“And you? How are you?”

“I’m all right. Just trying to get my bearings since we returned.”

“Still translating?”

“Not at the moment. It’s too long a story.”

“And your children have visited?”

Mamah’s face broke into a broad smile. “They did. I had worried so much after all the publicity. But my daughter Martha instantly struck up a friendship with a girl named Emma from the next farm over, and she has a boy cousin who is my John’s age. It went better than I had expected. They ended up caring very much for Frank, I think, by the end of the summer. He took them riding and fishing and spoiled them, of course.

“We had so many visitors last summer. People would see the house from the highway and drive up the road out of curiosity. There were organized trips, too. We had a group of normal school students come with their teachers. And a Sunday school class. Can you believe it?”

“Interesting how people adapt with a little time.”

“Even people like me. This is my home now, Taylor.”

“What will you do if you have to go back to Japan?”

She shifted thoughtfully on the bench. “I’ll cross that bridge when I have to, I guess.”

They sat in the sun, soaking up the pleasure of the warm air and each other’s company. After a time Taylor went to the studio to settle in, and Mamah remained in the garden. It was the most perfect time of year in Wisconsin—the second week of May. When she and Frank had returned to Taliesin in April, she’d been thrilled to be home in time to see the first asparagus-like plugs of peonies rise out of the ground, and to smell the lilacs when they first popped open. Nearly all the fruit trees had survived and were leafing out. The house looked more beautiful than ever. Frank had brought home vases and screens and gorgeous silk kimonos that he arranged artfully throughout the rooms. The Far East melded into the American Middle West without a peep of protest. Mamah and Frank’s common history—the prairie house, Italy, Japan, even a bit of Germany—seemed to permeate every square inch of Taliesin.

Some of the harder parts about this place had not changed. Mamah couldn’t look out at the driveway without remembering the reporters coming up to the house. And Frank’s mother, who’d vacated her bedroom when they returned from Japan, now sulked around Jennie’s house when Mamah appeared, barely speaking to her. But Mamah had come back to Jennie as well, as sunny and kind a friend as she could hope for. She had also come back to the prospect of her children’s summer visit a few weeks away, and to a small circle of friends that was beginning to grow.

There was work to get back to if she decided to go forward with it.
Frauenbewegung, The Woman Movement,
was waiting. She’d done no translating for Ellen while in Japan. In fact, she had left the States truly upset with Ellen. She and Frank had been set to depart in early January for California, where their ship would embark for Japan. When word came that the Spaulding brothers wanted to see Frank before he sailed, a quick trip to the East Coast was arranged. The bulk of the week was spent in Boston, but at Mamah’s request, she and Frank traveled to New York to confront Mr. Huebsch, the man who was publishing the pirated translation of
Love and Ethics.
It was the principle of the thing that had pushed Mamah to get the conflict settled, but a practical matter as well. The audience for
Love and Ethics
was so small, there wasn’t room for two translations on the market. Huebsch’s version was almost certainly causing the slow sales of her own translation. Frank had encouraged her to confront him.

What a disappointment it had been to track Huebsch down only to have the man Mamah had so demonized produce a check from Ellen Key that proved she had not only authorized but paid him for his translation.

There was no use pretending now. Ellen had simply lied to her. But even more disconcerting was a remark by Heubsch’s fawning assistant, just as they were departing. “I mean no offense, Miss Borthwick,” said the ascetic-looking man whose pants were belted across his chest, “but I have an associate over at Putnam’s who says Ellen Key prefers our translations of her work above all others. Putnam’s office in London feels the same way.”

“You pathetic worm,” Frank had shot back, his mouth nearly frothing. “You inconsequential—”

“We’ll go now,” Mamah said, pulling him along and out the door of the office.

They had caught the next train home, repacked quickly, and departed for California the next morning. Distraught, she took Heubsch’s translation of
Love and Ethics
and her own on the journey west. As it turned out, she had plenty of time to study them, since they missed their boat to Japan and had to remain an extra two weeks in California. She and Frank compared the two translations line by line during their wait. In some places she had to admit that Heubsch’s version was superior, while in other areas she felt she’d bested him. In the end, Mamah left the two translations on the writing desk of their hotel room and boarded the ship, intent on not thinking about Ellen Key for another six months.

And she had nearly managed. Every day on the ship was devoted to distracting Frank from his terrible seasickness. Once his feet hit the ground in Tokyo, though, he was immersed in meetings with government officials and, in his free moments, on the hunt for prints.

Frank had as his guide a remarkable man, Shugio Hiromichi, an Oxford-educated businessman with exquisite manners and connections to all levels of Japanese society, from highly placed officials to humble artisans. After a while Mamah stopped going along on the print hunts in the merchants’ quarters, especially at night. It made her uncomfortable to see Frank’s glassy gaze as he paused for a few words with Shugio on the steps of a go-down just before he went in, his heart clearly racing like a wolf’s outside a chicken coop. Mamah’s presence complicated the transactions, anyway. She was a woman, a well-dressed Westerner, who only gentrified the proceedings. “No bargains are going to be had in my presence,” she’d told the men after a few forays. “It’s best if you two go alone.”

Without her along, Frank could get dressed up in one of the costumes he fancied would help him pass as…what? An artist? Certainly not a native. No one she’d seen on the streets of Tokyo dressed as he did, in the full button-cuffed pants and puffy Dutch-boy hat he’d had styled by a local tailor. Where did he find shoes with wood heels so high? They made him taller, but they were as extreme in their way as the wooden platforms geishas wore in the teahouses. To see him decked out in a costume she once would have found charming now made her feel embarrassed and inexplicably angry.

The last transaction she’d witnessed had convinced her she didn’t have the stomach for commerce. They had been standing in a go-down, waiting for a merchant to retrieve his prints from a back room, when Frank spotted a large vase he admired on a table along the wall. He walked over to it and tapped it with a bamboo cane he had picked up in Tokyo. The tap nearly caused the vase to topple. “How much for this?” Frank had asked the man’s wife, who stood horror-stricken as she watched the pot sway, then right itself. The woman bowed her head and muttered. “It’s not for sale,” Shugio translated. “It has been in her family for many generations.”

The dramatics of the print negotiating that followed made Mamah squirm even more. Frank pretending high offense at an asking price. The poor old seller going off to the back of the room to consult with the wife. Frank wheedling, making small jokes, ingratiating himself, all through the translating finesse of Shugio, who seemed to smooth over the awkwardness. Then coming away with prints for almost nothing compared to what the Spaulding brothers would pay Frank. There was a mercenary quality to the proceedings that left a bad taste in Mamah’s mouth.