Loving Frank (4 page)

“Then you
must
do it. In fact, I think it’s your destiny.”

He let out a laugh and embraced her. “Do you know what’s wonderful about you, Mamah? You understand things others can’t begin to grasp. People think I’m being sentimental, eulogizing the prairie because it’s nearly gone. But that’s not what I’m after.”

She felt awkward and extricated herself from his arms.
What am
I
after,
she wondered,
that I court disaster standing here in this field with you?

They moved apart. The wind seemed to have calmed some.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “It’s just such a relief to talk. It’s so easy with you. The truth is, I live a pretty stultifying existence at home. I love my children, but…” He shrugged. “My life is not in them the way Catherine’s is. Her whole being is invested in them. I’ve done the same thing with my work, I know—taken refuge in it. But she and I have reached an impasse. And we are too far gone to fix it.”

Mamah thought,
Take me home.
They had left the safe territory of architecture. “People change over time,” she said. “I think it happens in a lot of marriages.”

Frank waited.

“That’s not what happened in my case, though,” she said. “I was mature enough—too mature. My head trumped my heart.” She looked at the ground, ashamed to betray Edwin in this way. “Ed is a good, decent man,” she said. “We’re just mismatched.” She did not confide what she’d been feeling these days. That lately, when her husband came into the same room, she felt as if the air had been sucked right out of it.

By the third day, there was no use pretending. There were furtive caresses, followed by long silences.

On the fourth morning, Mamah awoke nauseated and knew almost immediately. She called Frank’s office and left a message with his secretary: Mrs. Cheney is unable to meet today.

When he appeared unannounced the following Tuesday, she kept the screen door closed when she told him she would not see him again. Standing on the stoop, he looked stricken.

She put her palm on the wire mesh between them. “Frank,” she said, tipping her head back so the tears wouldn’t breach. “I just found out.” She forced cheer into her voice. “Ed and I are expecting a baby.”

MAMAH SNAPPED FROM
her reverie, climbed out of the tub, and returned to the bedroom, where she stared blankly into the closet.

I miss our talks.
Had he said that to other women? In the two years since the day she’d told him she was pregnant, she’d seen Frank driving his Stoddard-Dayton around town with one woman after another next to him. People called his car the “Yellow Devil” not only for its color and speed but also, she suspected, for his devil-may-care attitude about gossip. It was humiliating to think that he might regard her as he did those other clients or prospective clients or whoever they were.

When Mamah glanced at the clock, she realized she had only half an hour before Frank was scheduled to appear. She put on a white waist and black skirt, dug into her jewel box for the thin gold chain with one fat pearl. Brushing her hair into a twist at the back of her head, she leaned in close to the mirror to examine her face. She knew she’d done too much of that lately, looking for more evidence, as if she needed it, that she was nearly thirty-nine years old.

As a thin child, she had thought her features were freakish—a pole neck, a square jaw out of proportion to the rest of her, wide high cheekbones that earned her the nickname “bone face” in the schoolyard. Her horn spectacles had hidden the green eyes her father said were pretty. Only the arching brows might have been acceptable had they not behaved so infuriatingly. They gave away everything. “You’re angry,” her mother would say, studying the roiling black line across her forehead.

Around the age of eighteen, she had grown into her face. Her clumsy limbs became supple, and she found herself moving through the world with a new ease. The boys who had taunted her suddenly came calling.

With her hair swept up now, the long neck looked pretty with the pearl resting in the shell-like dip between her collarbones. She touched cologne on her wrist, took off her glasses, and closed the bedroom door.

CHAPTER
4

“
W
here is everyone?” Frank asked when he stepped into the foyer. He handed her the rolled-up drawings he carried under his arm and removed his long silk scarf.

“Lizzie and Louise took the children down to Marshall Field’s.” She felt awkward as she waited to take his coat, standing so close to him that she could smell the fragrance of the shaving cream he’d used. He was no taller than she, and his eyes—always so direct—were level with her own and impossible to avoid. He looked to be glowing; his face was ruddy from the cold.

“Ah, Field’s,” he said, inhaling with mock serenity, “the pinnacle of civilization.”

“It’s always matters of taste with you, isn’t it?” Mamah teased, showing him into the dining room.

“Well…” He rolled his eyes toward some syrupy pink carnations on the sideboard. She’d bought them at a greenhouse.

“I know. You’d rather see some old dead branch. But I like them.”

“That’s good.”

“Don’t patronize me, Frank Wright,” she said, half serious. “I’m not some client’s wife who lets you dress her.” The words came out wrong, but he knew what she meant. She wasn’t one of those women who permitted him—paid him—to design her china, her linens, even her dresses so she looked
right
in a Wright house. She wasn’t going to let him tell her she couldn’t put pink flowers on her mantel.

“I’ve never thought of you as some client’s wife. Not for a minute.”

Already,
she thought. She sat down at the table, smoothed the drawings flat. “Where were we when we left off on this project? It’s been a while.”

He took a chair across from her. “We were talking about true things.” His voice took on an edge. “Things that kept me sane for a time. Or don’t you remember?”

“I do.”

“Do you recall when you first came to see me at the studio? You had just been through Arthur Huertley’s house. You quoted Goethe. You called it ‘frozen music.’”

“It’s true. I wanted to dance right through that house.”

Frank shook his head. “I can’t begin to tell you the impression you made. Here was this beautiful woman, so articulate and gifted, who
comprehended
…Tell me something, Mamah. In all those hours we spent together, was I the only one feeling that wonder?”

She stared at her hands in her lap. “No.”

“So it wasn’t my imagination?”

Mamah looked up at him.
So quickly,
she thought.
I am putty in your hands so quickly.
She hesitated, pressed her lips together. “Do you remember my third visit to the studio?”

“Third?”

“Well, I do,” she said, “vividly. Your secretary let me in. I was early for an early appointment, so it must have been about eight-thirty in the morning. A big fire was already going in the fireplace. You were up on the balcony chatting with that artist—”

“Dickie Bock.”

“Yes.” Mamah drew in a breath. “He was up there sculpting away. I remember that you didn’t see me because I was off in a corner. Then Marion Mahony came in, and she didn’t see me, either. I must have been in shadow.” Mamah smiled, remembering the pleasure of watching the morning unfold at the studio.

“Marion looked so stylish,” she said. “She had on a heavy coat and a paisley turban. I can see it now. You looked down at her and said, ‘What is that thing on your head?’ I wanted to giggle out loud, but I kept quiet because she seemed wounded at first. She said, ‘Don’t you like it?’

“You came over to the railing then and teased her. You said, ‘On a magician, I like it.’ And without missing a beat, she shot back at you, ‘I
am
a magician.’”

Frank let out a belly laugh.

“Do you remember what you did then?” Mamah asked.

He shrugged.

“You put up your hands in surrender.”

Frank was grinning now. “She thinks she performs miracles for me.”

“Does she?”

“She keeps me sharp. She’s quick with the repartee.”

“Well, let me tell you something. I wanted to
be
Marion Mahony that day, more than you can imagine. I wanted to begin every morning by making you laugh out loud.”
Here I go again,
she thought, feeling her eyes growing moist. “To sit next to you, to look up and see someone sculpting…. To feel the creative energy swirling in that room…. That day in the studio, I longed to be someone you absolutely counted on. The truth is, I still do.”

Frank reached out his hand and ran it over her brow, then down one side of her face. His forefinger touched the pearl at her throat.

Mamah felt her heart racing. “Do you always fall in love with your clients?”

“Only once,” he said. “Only one.”

He stood up, took her hand, and led her to the sofa in the living room, where he gently eased her down. They lay together for some time, her head on his chest, before his hands began to move. His wrist bones cracked as he unbuttoned her shirtwaist and put his mouth to her breast. A rill of electricity shot down her body, yanked up her hips. Her hands were seeking him, struggling frantically against fabric. In a moment his whole length was next to her, the naked landscape of his body gliding over hers, as they wordlessly found a common rhythm.

CHAPTER
5

I
t was a summer of breathtaking risks.

For every careful plan, there was a careless visit. She would hear a knock on the door and find Frank standing there with his shirtsleeves rolled up and the blueprint for the garage under his arm, as if he had just popped over to settle a small detail.

Most of the time Louise and the children were at home. On those days he would get down on his knees and play with them, hauling John and Martha and their playmates around on his back while Mamah sat on the window seat in the library, fiddling with her skirt, balling up the linen, then smoothing it out again. She wondered if her jitteriness was apparent to Louise, if the sparks flicking like fireflies under her skin showed on the outside.

“You look radiant,” Mamah said one afternoon when Frank came through the door. He had a lilt in his step and his eyes were twinkling. His face and forearms were burnished from hours outside at work sites. Standing in the library, he glanced around the other rooms.

“They’re in Forest Park,” she said. “They all went over to the amusement park. About an hour ago.”

Frank tossed the drawings onto the window seat, put his hand behind her waist, and swirled her around the tiny library as if they were in a ballroom.

“Frank,” she protested, laughing. She felt exposed next to the open, un-curtained windows. Once, at the end of a dinner party, she had sat on the window seat with another woman, both of them drinking wine and smoking cigarettes. She’d looked up to see the Belknap girls gazing down on her from their bedroom window next door, and she’d had a distinct sense of being spied on. Was anybody up there now? It was impossible to tell. She tried to lead him to a back room, but he was pulling her down to the floor, and then it was too late. Their loving was muffled and furious.

Afterward, briefly, she lay with her head in the hollow of his shoulder, listening for footfalls on the pavement. Sunlight slanted over the roof next door and fell hot on her legs.

“It’s going to be the best damned garage in Oak Park,” Frank said, stroking her hair, “but it could take years to finish.”

IT FRIGHTENED HER TO FEEL
so out of control. But any thoughts of ending the affair floated away the minute he set foot in the same room. Frank Lloyd Wright was a life force. He seemed to fill whatever space he occupied with a pulsing energy that was spiritual, sexual, and intellectual all at once.

And the wonder of it was, he wanted
her.

When she looked in the mirror, she saw a woman pink-faced from desire. And from
being
desired. My Lord, what a narcotic! She hadn’t felt such a sense of power since she was a twenty-year-old college girl with a clutch of suitors.

“Ring me once and hang up, then I’ll call you back,” Frank instructed her. She did that only a couple of times. Isabelle, his assistant, would pick up, and Mamah would quickly lose her nerve. Instead she waited for him to contact her, and the waiting nearly killed her.

LATER THAT SUMMER,
when Frank took office space downtown in the Fine Arts Building, their trysts became easier. Mamah used the excuse of a Wednesday-afternoon class to get out of the house. She took the train into Chicago, walked to Michigan Avenue, and went up in the elevator to the tenth floor. Once, as she hurried down the hallway hoping not to meet anyone, the door across from Frank’s opened, and she caught a glimpse of Lorado Taft chiseling in his studio. Mamah knew the famous sculptor was a longtime friend of Frank and Catherine. He had looked up from his work that day, caught her eye, and smiled in a disturbing, knowing sort of way. Burning with embarrassment, Mamah slipped into Frank’s office, sank down on a chair, bent over, and put her face in her lap. After that, she wore a large bonnet with a scarf over its crown and tied under her chin, as if she’d just stepped out of an automobile.

Another time, as she emerged from the elevator, she spotted a neighbor, one of his old clients, standing in the hall at the door of Frank’s office, taking his leave. She bent her head so her hat hid her face, then walked down the steps to the floor below. Standing there in the stairwell, waiting, she could hear some would-be Paderewski pounding out a piano concerto. From another room, a teacher’s voice called out positions above the soft thud of ballet slippers.

Her own heart was thudding by the time she returned to the tenth floor. When she was safe inside his office, he locked the door and pulled the shades down over his windows. They picked up the thread of their almost-life together then, opening up to each other in the darkened room.

They longed to be out in the world, taking it in together. Early in the summer, when they were being extra cautious, they arranged to arrive separately at a downtown nickelodeon where a Tom Mix movie was showing. Sitting a couple of rows from him, she could hear Frank’s deep laugh explode throughout the movie, and that sent her into gales. Frank left before she did. The plan was for her to walk to the corner so he could pick her up there. When she got out on the street, she noticed that an enterprising vendor had set up a display of cowboy hats right outside the theater. She stopped and impulsively picked out a wide-brimmed tan hat.

“That’s your B.O.P. Stetson, ma’am,” the man said, “the best. Stands for ‘Boss of the Plains.’”

She laughed. “Perfect.”

“It’ll run you more,” the vendor cautioned. “It’s twelve dollars.”

“I’ll take it.” She stuffed money into his hand.

Frank swooped up moments later in his yellow car and could barely conceal his delight. He put on the hat and drove them to the north side, to a tiny German restaurant. What a sight he made, dressed in a duster that hung down to his high boot heels, with the Stetson perched above his driving goggles.

Settled in a booth, she found he wanted to relive each scene from the film. She was amused by how boyish he was, sitting there with the big hat next to him, nearly in convulsions over the memory of desperadoes falling off their horses as Tom Mix chased them down.

SOMETIMES THEY DROVE OUT
into the country, the yellow car ripping at terrifying speeds over rutted roads. They stopped along the way for whatever the stands were selling—strawberries, cantaloupe. Frank had a blanket in the car that he spread out, then he took off his shoes and wiggled his toes. “God, that feels good,” he said every single time he stripped off his socks.

He loved Whitman. He would lie on his stomach and read
Leaves of Grass
to her. There were long stretches, though, when they didn’t talk, just sat near each other. They could have hummed, she thought, and understood each other perfectly.

One day, after they had finished eating, Frank cleaned his hands in ditch water near where they sat, then produced from the car a portfolio full of Japanese woodblock prints. He spread the prints out carefully on the blanket.

“These are by Hiroshige,” he said, pointing to three of them. “Pictures of the floating world.”

She studied a print of a courtesan fanning herself. “I’ve never understood what that means—‘the floating world.’”

“They’re pictures of common people just living for the moment—going to the theater, making love. They’re floating along like leaves on a river, not worrying about money or what’s going to happen tomorrow.

“I bought these when I was in Japan,” he said, taking two landscapes from the portfolio. Mamah remembered Catherine Wright’s stories about that trip to Japan. She’d told of how Frank would leave every evening dressed as a local in a straw hat, disappearing with a translator into the back streets of Kyoto, on the prowl for prints.

“Nature is everything to the Japanese,” he said. “When they build a house, they face it toward the garden.”

“I knew Japan had influenced you,” she said. “I didn’t realize how much.” She thought she saw him flinch. “You don’t like the word ‘influenced,’ do you?”

“Hate it, actually. Beaux Arts snobs—the academics—use it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. But I want you to understand. Nobody’s influenced me. Why should I copy the Japanese or the Aztecs or anybody else when I can make something beautiful of my own? It all comes from here.” He tapped a finger on one temple. “And from nature.”

“I know that,” she said. She didn’t like the feeling of being chastised by Frank. “It was simply the wrong word.” Mamah turned back to the prints. “I love this one.” She looked closely at the picture of a courtesan reclining on a bed, reading a book.

“Then it’s yours.”

She was giddy when she took the print home that day. She put it between the pages of a large picture album where Edwin would never look.

WHEN CATHERINE INVITED MAMAH
and Edwin over for dinner in early August, Mamah saw no recourse but to go. She had not seen Catherine in weeks. After dinner, with the men in the studio, the women settled into the living room. They talked about club news and their children and the books they were reading. At one point Catherine got up to retrieve a book from a shelf across the room.

“Did you ever see this?” she asked. She held a copy of
The House Beautiful
in her hands. “You know Reverend Gannett, don’t you? Frank illustrated his essays for this book. It must have been back in ’96,” she mused. “It was our bible in those days.”

Catherine paged through the book, reminiscing about the time early in their marriage when Frank was building their house. “He wanted to carve a saying over every doorway. I told him, ‘Just one.’ Don’t ask me where I got the gumption to put my foot down—you know Frank—but it worked. We were young and in love, and he went along with me.”

Mamah glanced at the familiar words over the fireplace.
LIFE IS TRUTH
.

“How did you meet Frank?” she asked impulsively, horrified at once by her own perverse curiosity.

“At a costume dance at his Uncle Jenk’s church on the south side,” Catherine said, “near where I grew up.” A smile spread across her face at the memory. “We were all dressed as characters from
Les Miserables.
Frank was dressed as an officer with epaulets and a sword. I was supposed to be a French maid. It was a reel, I guess, because when everyone changed partners, we just slammed right into each other. Knocked each other right to the floor.”

Catherine flipped to the back of the book. “There’s this one poem Reverend Gannett quotes, called ‘Togetherness,’ that is just so beautiful. It was written by a woman who only had eleven years with her husband before he died. Isn’t that sad? Here, you read it. I’m going to put out dessert.”

Mamah held the book on her lap. She could see herself from the outside, sitting in the same chair she had sat in many times before. The room hadn’t changed. Catherine hadn’t changed. It was she who had changed into someone who could assess in one cool glance the failings of her lover’s household.

She saw now that there was almost no trace of Catherine in the things of the house—every inch of the place was Frank’s eye, from the plaster frieze around the top of the room, depicting mythological kings and giants locked in battle, to the moss-colored velvet drapes on either side of the inglenook. But in the commotion of the house, the entrances and exits of children seeking out their mother, in the
sounds
of the house, there was no question who presided.

Mamah scanned the poem quickly to its last verse.

Together greet life’s solemn real,

Together own one glad ideal,

Together laugh, together ache,

And think one thought—“Each other’s sake,”

And hope one hope—in new-world weather,

To still go on, and go together.

“Tripe,” she muttered to herself.

Yet a nausea had taken hold of her belly by the time Catherine arrived with dessert, and she hurried Edwin out the door, pleading sickness.

In the early hours of the morning, she got out of bed and went to the kitchen in search of a cracker to settle her stomach. When she opened the cupboard, a small brown moth flew out. She knew what that meant. If she didn’t get rid of the flour and rice and cereal in the cabinet, if she waited until Wednesday, when the cleaning girl came, there would be two dozen moths hanging upside down from the shelves. She held up one bag of grain after another to the kitchen lightbulb, looking for tiny white larvae, tossing anything suspect into a garbage barrel. In the end, she dumped the entire contents of the cabinet, then filled a bowl with hot water and ammonia.