Loving Frank (33 page)

“These prints are not high art to the Japanese,” Frank reassured her one day as he prepared to send off another telegram to the Spauldings asking for more money. “It’s the common man’s art. The sellers don’t feel they’re sacrificing anything. In fact, they believe they’re getting the better of
me.
”

Despite her queasiness during Frank’s nighttime forays, she couldn’t help laughing when he came back so full of good cheer and interesting stories. Only once did he return deeply sobered. He’d been followed back to the hotel by a fearsome-looking man who appeared to be waiting for the right moment to pounce. Word was clearly out on the street that there was a wild print buyer in town with cash in his pockets. Shugio and Frank had wanted the word to pass to print owners, but it had passed to the pickpockets, too. After that, Mamah worried until he was safely ensconced in their room.

“When do I get my architect back?” she said gently one night when he returned ill-humored and empty-handed after an outing.

His whole body seemed disappointed in her when he spoke. “It weighs on me, Mamah, that as bright as you are, you persist in not wanting to understand this part of my life.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin and pushed his chair back.

“I understand, it’s just that—”

Frank raised his hand dismissively. “It’s our bread and butter right now. But pretty soon it won’t matter. I believe I’ve nearly cleaned out Japan of its best old prints. They get harder to find by the day.”

Without the focus of translating, or any real purpose of her own, Mamah felt rudderless in Japan after a few weeks. She was careful not to show her unhappiness to Frank. She didn’t want to play the miserable Griselda, as Catherine Wright had on her trip to Japan with Frank, patiently sitting alone in the hotel, wondering when he would return. There had been suggestions in Catherine’s stories of “disappointments,” which Mamah had taken to mean visits by Frank to the pleasure quarters during his absences. Had Frank done that to her this time? Had he been lying with a white-faced, red-lipped woman all afternoon? She knew how smitten he was by the erotic woodblock prints of geishas he had turned up. She had to admit that it was possible. Lately, he was so preoccupied, he barely spoke to her.

“Let’s go out to the countryside today, just the two of us,” she’d proposed one morning.

“Can’t,” he said. “Shugio has found a man—”

“Frank.” She put her hands on his shoulders. “We’re drifting. I’ve hardly seen you in the past two weeks.”

He groaned in exasperation. “I’ve been obsessed, I admit it. But my God, the things I’ve found! You’ve got to be patient.”

“I’m trying.”

He rubbed her temples with his fingertips. “What’s going on in here?”

“Only bad things, I’m afraid.” She tried to keep her voice light.

“Such as?”

“Oh, Frank. I keep thinking about the things I’ve done wrong. One minute I think about what Heubsch said about Ellen’s unhappiness with my translating—”

“You’re going to believe that bullcrap? If you have any doubts, ask Ellen outright.”

“And then the next minute…”

“Yes?”

“I think about how long I will have been gone from the children by the time this trip is over with. Six months is just too much.”

“But how many times could you have seen them during that six months? A few weekends?”

“I keep thinking about Martha.”

“What about Martha?”

“That weekend I went into Chicago just before the trip out east? Before we traveled to California?”

“Yes?”

“When I got up on Sunday morning and dressed, you know, getting ready to meet Edwin down in the lobby and hand them over, I couldn’t find my shoes. I looked all over the room, and then I found them in the bathroom behind a radiator. Martha had hidden them.” Mamah’s eyes filled with tears. “She didn’t want me to go away again. And look what I’ve done.”

Frank wrapped her in his arms and rocked her.

“I know what I said before.” The tears were coming now. “That the children need some distance from me to heal. But I can’t help thinking, what will happen if you do get this job? What will happen if I come back to Japan with you and I am gone from them for a whole year? Can they take that much distance? Because I don’t think I can.”

“You’re getting way ahead of yourself. Now, listen. I’m coming home early today, and we’ll plan out a trip to Kyoto. You will love it there.”

“What I’m trying to say to you is a good thing, Frank. That Taliesin is my home now. After all these months and years of not knowing where I would be, or where I even
wanted
to be, all I can think about is going back there.”

“Patience.” He kissed her forehead. “The print trading will keep us afloat until the hotel comes through. It’s going to be a seven-million-dollar project. Four or five hundred thousand in architect’s fees. Now, who do you want to get the job?”

“You,” she said, “of course.”

CHAPTER
43

“
L
et’s have a picnic before Taylor leaves,” Frank said one morning.

He had talked about fishing in the river since they’d been back from Japan. She smiled at the sight of him ahead of her now, conversing with his two young draftsmen, who hung on his every word.

When Frank found a spot he liked, they spread out the blankets and took off their shoes. She unloaded the cheese and sausages, passed out four plates.

Frank was peeling off his socks. “So what’s happened in the world of American architecture in my absence, gentlemen?” he asked. “Tell me there’s been a coup in the palace.”

Mamah half listened as names were mentioned, buildings described. The day was as perfect as any she’d passed in Wisconsin. Low clouds were racing over the hills, flickering sun on and off the green field grass like light in a moving picture. She lay down on her side and closed her eyes, following the hum of the conversation more than its substance. She noticed how reverently Taylor and Emil addressed him, how they laughed at his stories. She didn’t have to see him to know he was happy. This was what he’d imagined in Italy when he’d told her how he would school young architects. No classrooms, only his drawing board. And picnics. He had forgotten to add picnics.

In Japan, he had fallen into a dark reverie one evening over how some employees had betrayed him. In a fit of anger, he’d said he would never again use any draftsman who had worked for him before. It would be only Germans and Austrians from here on out, young people who could handle the apprentice system. Yet here was Taylor, his one exception, she supposed. And Emil Brodelle, a Milwaukee boy whose background she suspected was neither German nor Austrian.

But they were audience enough. Soon it was only Frank’s voice holding forth uninterrupted, talking of architecture in Europe and Japan and America. She became aware that when one of the others squeezed in a few words, Frank barely acknowledged him. Nor did he laugh at their jokes. He only half listened while he seemed to be formulating his next witticism.

Emil jumped in when Frank paused. “What do you think of Walter Griffin winning the contest to design Canberra? I heard he and Marion Mahony have already moved to Australia. It’s something, isn’t it? To design the capitol of an entire country?”

Mamah opened her eyes and caught Taylor’s glance. Frank knew Marion had married Walter Griffin. She looked in Frank’s direction, but he made no move to show he’d heard a word. He was buttering a piece of bread.

Emil squirmed in the silence. “They both worked with you at one time, didn’t they, sir?”

Frank chewed his bread thoughtfully. “Griffin was a student of mine briefly; he’s been sucking my eggs ever since. As for her, she was an illustrator more than architect.”

Mamah flinched. The complaint about Griffin was old hat. But it pained her to hear Frank deny Marion her due. She had an actual architecture degree from MIT. She had been with Frank in the Oak Park office almost from the beginning. In fact, it was Marion’s presentation drawing, with its luscious foliage and tree trunks, that had convinced Mamah and Edwin to hire Frank in the first place.

“Frank,”
Mamah humored him, “now, Frank. You know she was your right hand. Marion is every
inch
an architect.”

Frank looked out over the river. He stood up and fetched his fishing pole. “Who’s getting the first one, boys?”

The men strung themselves along the riverbank and sank their hooks. After ten or fifteen minutes, there were cheers and congratulations. Frank had caught a fish.

BACK AT THE HOUSE,
Mamah walked into the kitchen while Frank was at the counter, gutting the paddlefish he’d caught. When she approached and stood nearby, he stopped what he was doing. He waited, his sharp knife frozen in midair over the wet carcass until she instinctively moved a step back. Then he sank the blade again into the tumid flesh of the fish and finished the job.

Mamah felt confused. It had seemed in that moment that he was furious with her. She assumed he was angry because she had contradicted him in front of his draftsmen. It wasn’t the first time she had felt as if he couldn’t bear her nearness, though. Sometimes her foot would touch his under the table during dinner, and he would make a great show of moving his foot away, adjusting his position in relation to her, as if to say,
Are you quite finished arranging yourself?

He seemed to feel space and objects with the sensitivity of a bat. She remembered many evenings when he’d sat down to dinner and promptly swept aside his silverware. It was a habit that struck Mamah as crude, almost contemptuous, since she had just set the table only moments before.

“Why do you do that?” she’d asked him once.

“Do what?”

“Push aside your silver that way, as if you’re angry.”

“I hate clutter.”

“Silverware is clutter?” she asked.

“Until I’m ready to use it, yes.”

That night, though, as they spooned together, the skin of his chest warm upon her back, she decided she had misread him. He had simply needed elbow room this afternoon.
One more new wrinkle to adapt to, but not worth trying to change,
she thought.
I might as well try to alter his eye color or reshape his nose.

CHAPTER
44

D
arby and Joan were hitched up when Mamah came out in the morning. Frank must have asked the handyman, Tom Brunker, to do it before he left, because the wagon was all ready to go.

“Might rain,” Tom said to Mamah, running his hand over the haunch of one of the sorrels. “Plan to be out long?”

“A few hours. I don’t want to miss the wildflowers this year. I heard there’s a whole stretch of them in the woods over near the Paulson place.”

Mamah took the reins and guided the horses down the drive and onto the road. Out in the country, the appearance of the wildflowers was like a theater debut in the city. She was reminded of another day years before, when Mattie had persuaded her to take the Switzerland Trail train ride outside Boulder. She and the children had come back with bouquets of flowers.

She spotted the spread of pink gaywings when she approached the woods. Mamah climbed down from the rig and walked carefully, bending to examine the winglike petals and the soft little flowers that had sprung up through a carpet of brittle leaves faded to beige by winter. She would not pick any of them; they were too perfect right here. She sat down in a grassy spot and thought about Mattie. What would she make of how everything had worked out?

A year ago Mamah had written to Alden to inquire about his well-being and that of the children. She had not heard back from him. When she’d finally gotten a reply, it was from Mattie’s brother, Lincoln, who was raising the children in Iowa.
Alden is working at a mine in Colombia,
he had written to her.
South America.

Alden had done what so many widowed men did—passed on his children to a relative’s home where there was an able-bodied woman. Would Mattie be sorely disappointed in her husband? For a long while after her death, Mattie’s voice was the one Mamah had heard in her head, the judging voice. It struck her, hunched among the flowers, that she hadn’t heard it in a long while.

Mamah took her time driving home. Frank and Taylor had taken the train into Chicago, where Taylor would board another one and return to Salt Lake. “You got your villa,” he’d said when he hugged her goodbye. She had felt a rush of sadness as he pulled away.

She had no obligations except for a brief meeting this evening, when a couple of local churchwomen were scheduled to come to the house. Mamah had offered, through Dorothea, to give English lessons to the Swedish and German house girls around the area. To her astonishment, they had agreed to her idea.

When she drove the wagon through the porte cochere, Mamah saw a delivery truck pulled up in the driveway behind the house. It was like the one that had delivered the plants a year before, and her first thought was that Frank had ordered more trees, though he hadn’t mentioned it.

“Why the truck?” she asked Billy, who was standing next to it.

“A delivery from Marshall Field’s.”

“I don’t know anything about a delivery.”

“Paid in full, it says.” He handed her the bill of lading. “By Mr. Wright.”

“What is it?”

“Furniture.” Billy shifted from foot to foot and looked at the ground. “I hope you don’t mind, but they went ahead and did what he asked. Mr. Wright drew out a sketch of where to put it all.”

All?
She entered the foyer, then stepped around into the living room. A large Chinese carpet covered the middle of the floor. Another rested beneath the dining table where—
one, two, three,
she counted…six—new chairs surrounded it. Another six chairs were scattered around the room. In the corner, she saw a gleaming grand piano.

Billy had come in behind her. “Do you want me to lay out those rugs over there?” He pointed to a stack of nine or ten rolled-up rugs in varying sizes. “The drawing didn’t show where those went.”

Mamah felt her face burning. “No, Billy. Thank you. Would you ask Tom to put the horses away?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And may I have that?”

He handed her the slip of paper and went out.

There was nothing on it to show the cost of the goods—just the items shipped were listed. Frank would not be back from Chicago for two days. He had talked as he left about the possibility—
possibility
—of a huge job he was scheduled to discuss with a contact. An enormous beer garden, an entertainment center, he’d said. It might be three days before he got home, depending upon meetings.

Mamah walked over to the pile of rugs and opened the smallest one. It was a red and blue Turkoman with a pattern of a square rotated within a square—a pattern Frank himself had used. She understood immediately why he had chosen the rug. She rolled it up again, then took off her shoes and walked across the Chinese carpet. She knew why he had picked this one, too—for its indigo-blue field and pattern of ivory cranes and vines winding around its border.

She sat down on the window seat and looked around the room. She could see what he had envisioned when he selected each piece. The chairs were simple oak with leather-upholstered seats that could be used for dining or moved around to accommodate a large group. Twelve of them, all the same—a great luxury—and as suited to the room as if he had designed them himself. The rugs added the depth he was after, and echoed the colors of the kimono on the wall.

And the piano. She could see Frank standing in front of the piano, hearing Beethoven and Mozart. He would have pictured himself leaving his drawing table to play Bach while he worked through a problem in his head. He would have imagined special invited guests—traveling musicians who’d come to Madison to perform, perhaps—who would be honored to visit the famous architect and his already-famous Taliesin, to sit down at his gorgeous Steinway piano and play for the women and men in evening clothes, fascinating guests upon whom the moment would not be lost. Frank would have been filled with the most profound sense of rightness about all of the things he had bought.

She could imagine the look in his eyes as he went through Marshall Field’s, acquiring the furniture and rugs as quickly as he bought prints in Japan. Feverish with the excitement of taking possession of beautiful found objects.

What she could not imagine was how he had paid for them.

A light summer rain had begun to fall. She flung open the living room windows to air out the strange smells of the new furnishings. Then she went and telephoned the two churchwomen to cancel the meeting, pleading illness. It was impossible to have them to Taliesin. When she did meet with them, it would be at one of their homes. How could she have country people who lived in tiny farmhouses enter this place now?

When a rap came on the door, it startled her.

“Josiah!” she said when she opened it. “I wasn’t expecting anyone. It’s so good to see you. Come in.”

The young man stepped through the foyer into the living room. “Mrs. Borthwick,” he said, nodding his head.

“Sit down. I haven’t seen you in a long while.”

Josiah took his hat off but declined a seat. He was quiet for a moment, looking first at the ceiling, then running his hand along the oiled oak of the living room door frame.

She smiled. “It looks beautiful, doesn’t it? You men did a fine job.”

“I reckon we did.” He kneaded his hat in his hands. “Is Mr. Wright around?”

“No, he’s not. He’s in Chicago until tomorrow. What is it you need? Maybe I can help you.”

Josiah looked away, and in that moment he spotted the new piano. He let out an admiring whistle. She noticed him sway slightly and could tell that he had been drinking.

“He owes me money,” he said, “for the bookcases.”

“The bookcases in my study?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But that was a year ago, Josiah.”

“Over a year.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, I’m sure, all right. Never paid me a dime.”

“So you’ve spoken to him about this?”

“Three times.”

“And what did he say?”

Josiah snorted. “The first two times he said he just forgot to pay me. But the last time he said I should feel privileged to work for him. How did he put it?” Josiah squinted and looked across the room. “To add my
creativity
to Taliesin. He said that should be payment enough. And then”—he began to laugh—“he thanked me for my
contribution.
”

Mamah’s stomach throbbed. “I’ll talk to him when he returns. You’ll get your money, Josiah.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

THAT NIGHT SHE WOKE
in a panic. She had no idea how much or how little money they had. Frank had said their finances were in good shape since the trip to Japan. She realized now that she did not trust him.

Months ago she’d set up an account book for him, for the Taliesin studio and the household. She had kept tabs on groceries and studio expenses. But there had been little business coming in, and then they’d gone to Japan for six months. How much had they spent in order to live in Japan, never mind the art and textiles they had bought? She hadn’t any real notion.

Lying in bed, she tried to calculate their income and expenses, but she could think only of how much everything had cost. She knew there were loan payments to be made to Darwin Martin for Taliesin and a mortgage on the house in Oak Park; college tuition for two of his children, plus everything else that his family needed—shoes, clothes, food, school things, doctor visits. Rent for the office he had taken at Orchestra Hall. Salary for his office manager there and for Emil here, as well as the workmen at Taliesin. She thought of Billy and the others and shuddered at the prospect that there were probably times they had not been paid on time. But would they be here if they hadn’t been paid at all?

There were also the exhibits Frank participated in, which always cost money to prepare for. That was where dollars were going now, models and drawings for a show of his work at the Art Institute. Beyond that, she suspected he gave money to his mother to live on. And he was talking about buying thirty more acres for Taliesin from Jennie and her husband. Had he done that already? She didn’t know.

And the things he had done for her, such as pay Ralph Seymour the cost of publishing the first three translations of Ellen’s books—they’d never made money back on those. Plus, he fed her. My God, he had to feed so many people. Animals, too—horses and cows. She didn’t want to count the mouths that depended on him.

But what was there to count of income? The Littles’ summer house. Sherman Booth’s house. There was the chance of a bank in Madison. That was all, except for the prints. Frank had received a commission from the Spauldings for his work, which he was to split with Shugio. The dollar amounts had kept changing as Frank wired back to the brothers in Boston for more money, and she assumed his commission had gone up as the Spauldings’ investment increased. What had he ended up with? She had been reluctant to ask. There were so many deals she knew nothing about. Meetings happened at his office in Chicago, contacts came and went. She had seen money go in and out of his pockets like a bank teller’s drawer, with no accounting at the end of the day. One time she’d found four-month-old checks crumpled together with dollar bills in his winter coat.

Mamah looked at the brass alarm clock by her bed. Three o’clock. She got up, threw a shawl over her nightgown, and went to his studio. Frank used a long table with a cloth on top as a desk. Underneath it were boxes full of correspondence and a few files marked with the names of clients and other people to whom he frequently wrote. Darwin Martin had his own box. She read a number of Martin’s letters. In most of them, he was responding to Frank’s request for loans, or to buy prints, or to take prints as collateral on a loan. Mamah was struck by Martin’s capitulation time and again to Frank’s requests, but also by his condescending tone, how free he felt to dispense advice and scold Frank about his personal life.

For the next three hours, she waded through the boxes, trying to make sense of the contents. For a man who worshipped order, Frank’s papers were in chaos, much like his pants pockets. In one box, wedged between files, were IOUs with dates from five years back, canceled checks, letters from his children and clients, and official-looking loan documents. And bills, bills, bills. Another box contained mostly lumberyard and building supply bills. She divided these into two piles—those paid in full and those partially paid or unpaid. She shivered as she dealt out the bills, watching the unpaid stack grow. Some of them went back to the summer they’d broken ground for Taliesin. Many of them bore handwritten notes begging for payment.

The angriest letters were posted from towns nearby. They were the oldest bills. Spring Green, Richland Center. There appeared to be a pattern. The more recent bills came from Mineral Point, from Madison. She suspected he was sending his men farther and farther out to buy lumber because he hadn’t paid his suppliers in nearby towns.

The scale of his debt took her breath away. The thought that she was as culpable as he—occupying this extraordinary house, traveling abroad, living a privileged life while their creditors were stuck holding the bag—made her want to hide in one moment and smash something in the next.