Loving Frank (42 page)

He returns on foot to Taliesin, sick and shaking, trying to pull himself together. He doesn’t want to collapse again in front of his good, brave son. Up ahead, the black hole in the hillside looms like a mirror image of his heart.

Only his studio remains, and the barn. He asks one of his cousins who is in the barn to harness Darby and Joan, then he collects a scythe and walks to Mamah’s garden. It stands, incredibly, nearly untouched by the destruction. Some of her roses have just opened.

He sinks to his knees among the flowers and speaks to her in his mind, waiting to hear her voice come back. Her spirit is not here, though, not even in her garden. He sits back on his heels, smelling the fragrance of a half-dozen different plants, trying to find some comfort in it.

After a while he swings the scythe and cuts down the flowers she loved. John opens the pine box so his father can cover her body with hollyhocks, roses, sunflowers, zinnias. Then he closes it, and they load the box onto the wagon, throwing armfuls of phlox and daisies onto the wagon bed.

It is evening by the time they are ready to go to the chapel graveyard. Storm clouds passing overhead land heavy raindrops on Frank and John as they walk beside the spring wagon, leading the sorrels. At the churchyard, two cousins of Frank wait to help him lower the coffin into the fresh-dug earth. The box is surprisingly heavy. The air is filled with their grunts and the sound of rope rubbing against wood. When it is settled at the bottom, father and son toss flowers onto the box until it is covered and the hole is strewn all around with yellow-, blue-, and red-petaled flowers. Then Frank asks everyone to leave him there alone.

Standing by the open grave, he speaks to her. “You stood everything so bravely, my friend.” They had spoken so often of their spirits and souls as if they were palpable things. He feels no presence, yet he speaks. “You were such a good woman, Mamah,” he says. “The best on earth.”

Before darkness falls completely, he pulls from his pocket a handwritten copy of the Goethe poem they translated together. Some of it he knows from memory, and the rest he reads aloud.

Nature!

We are encompassed and enveloped by her, powerless to emerge and powerless to penetrate deeper.

Unbidden and unwarned she takes us up in the round of her dance and sweeps us along, until exhausted we fall from her arms.

Frank reads the long poem to the end, his voice quaking as cool rain meets hot tears on his face.

She has placed me here; she will lead me hence—

I confide myself to her.

She may do with me what she will: she will not despise her work.

I speak not of her. No, what is true and what is false, she herself has spoken all.

All the fault is hers; hers is all the glory.

CHAPTER
54

I
n the little bedroom behind the studio, Frank huddles in bed, reliving the past week. On Tuesday both Tom and David died, and on Wednesday Frank buried David in the family plot. Seven dead in all. Only Billy and Fritz have survived.

When he does fall off to sleep, his limbs twitch as he dreams of batting his hands at the mad face of Julian Carlton. He sees Mamah’s burned scalp, the few remaining wisps of her thick hair poking from her head like wild grasses. He leaps up in terror, runs outside to lie on the ground, but everything is soaked. Rain has poured down since the night he buried her. On Sunday night, in fact, there was a hailstorm.

Some would take the hail, along with the whole nightmare, as a sign of heaven’s reckoning with Mamah Borthwick. He doesn’t have to hear “It was God’s hand” to know that it is being said. On Monday, when he reads the account of the tragedy in the Sunday
Chicago Tribune,
every line seems pregnant with unwritten words: divine retribution.

In a spurt of rage, he composes a letter to the
Weekly Home News.
The pen’s tip nearly slashes the paper as he writes.

To My Neighbors:

To you who have rallied so bravely and well to our assistance—to you who have been invariably kind to us all—I would say something to defend a brave and lovely woman from the pestilential touch of stories made by the press for the man in the street, even now with the loyal fellows lying dead beside her, any one of whom would have given his life to defend her. I cannot bear to leave unsaid things that might brighten memory of her in the mind of anyone. But they must be left unsaid. I am thankful to all who showed her kindness or courtesy, and that means many. No community anywhere could have received the trying circumstances of her life among you in a more high-minded way. I believe at no time has anything been shown her as she moved in your midst but courtesy and sympathy. This she won for herself by her innate dignity and gentleness of character but another—perhaps any other community—would have seen her through the eyes of the press that even now insists upon decorating her death with the fact, first and foremost, that she was once another man’s wife, “a wife who left her children.”

That must not be forgotten in this man-made world. A wife still is “property.” And yet the well-known fact that another bears the name and title she once bore had no significance. The birds of prey were loosed upon her in death as well as in life…. But this noble woman had a soul that belonged to her alone—that valued womanhood above wifehood or motherhood. A woman with a capacity for love and life made really by a…finer courage, a higher more difficult ideal of the white flame of chastity than was “moral” or expedient and for which she was compelled to crucify all that society holds sacred and essential—in name….

In our life together there has been no thought of secrecy except to protect others from the contaminating stories of newspaper scandal; no pretense of a condition that did not exist. We have lived frankly and sincerely as we believed and we have tried to help others to live their lives according to their ideals.

Neither of us expected to relinquish a potent influence in our children’s lives for good—nor have we. Our children have lacked the atmosphere of an ideal love between father and mother—nothing else that could further their development. How many children have more in the conventional home? Mamah’s children were with her when she died. They have been with her every summer. She felt that she did more for her children in holding high above them the womanhood of the mother than by sacrificing it to them. And in her life, the tragedy was that it became necessary to choose the one or the other….

Nor did Mamah ever intend to devote her life to theories or doctrines. She loved Ellen Key as everyone does who knows her. Only true love is free love—no other kind is or ever can be free. The “freedom” in which we joined was infinitely more difficult than any conformity with customs could have been. Few will ever venture it. It is not lives lived on this plane that menace the well-being of society. No, they can only serve to ennoble it….

Mamah and I have had our struggles, our differences, our moments of jealous fear for our ideals of each other—they are not lacking in any close human relationship—but they served only to bind us more closely together. We were more than merely happy even when momentarily miserable….

Her soul has entered me and it shall not be lost.

You wives with your certificates for loving—pray that you may love as much or be loved as well as was Mamah Borthwick! You mothers and fathers with daughters—be satisfied if what life you have invested in them works itself out upon as high a plane as it had done in the life of this lovely woman. She was struck down by a tragedy that hangs by the slender thread of reason over the lives of all, a thread which may snap at any time in any home with consequences as disastrous….

She is dead. I have buried her in the little chapel burying ground of my people…and while the place where she lived with me is a charred and blackened ruin, the little things of our daily life gone, I shall replace it all little by little as nearly as it may be done. I shall set it all up again for the spirit of the mortals that lived in it and loved it—will live in it still. My home will still be there.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Taliesin
August 20, 1914

When the letter is finished, he is spent. He passes it to one of the workmen to take into Spring Green, then climbs into bed once again.

How he longs to feel the life they had together. Even just a few minutes would be a gift. My God, how they lived. They were
alive. Together
. For a fleeting moment he can picture the exact green of her eyes. In summer she always wore pale blue dresses, and the green turned her eyes aqua blue.

He remembers a morning a few weeks ago. He had come home from the chaos at Midway Gardens for a one-day respite. “Let’s go riding tomorrow,” she had said the moment she saw him, sensing how desperately he needed to get away from mortar and cement and the tension of the construction site.

They went out to a strip of prairie the next day with a picnic bag, as always, strapped onto Champion’s flank. It was a glorious summer morning, as lovely as he could remember. Even the horses seemed charged by the air. They rode on a trail for a mile or two, then waded through mustard-colored goldenrod and purple asters to a small clearing. Mamah was wearing her old riding breeches. She dismounted and took down her bag of picnic things.

Frank walked the horses a short distance away and tied them to an oak. One of the horses let go a heavy stream of urine, and she called out, “Is that you?” She was teasing, of course, but she knew it could have been him. She found it amusing that he often “marked his spot” out in the woods, like a dog, whenever he was assessing a possible building site.

“Just surveying, dear,” he’d called back.

Gertrude had made sandwiches naked of anything but thick slabs of cheese. Frank bit into one and frowned. “She must have been reading the funnies when she made these.”

“Ah, but there’s dessert,” Mamah said. She unwrapped the cookies, delicious-looking things with pecans in them. They ate them all.

“Blue gentian,” she said after a while, peering through her horn-rimmed spectacles at a low-growing flower near the edge of the blanket.

“Did you wear your glasses all the time when I first fell in love with you?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

He reached over and took them off her. “You know, if you exercised your eyeballs, you wouldn’t need the things.”

She laughed her trilling giggle that cascaded down to an earthy guffaw. “You are susceptible to some of the silliest ideas, have I told you that?”

“And the boots are certainly a recent development,” he said. “I regret to say I bought the damn things. You used to wear the most delicate little leather boots.” He unlaced them and pulled them off. “And look at these socks. Where are we, the Crimea?” He removed the thick cotton stockings she wore. He rose on his knees and went behind her back, unbuttoning her loose blouse, then her camisole. Mamah smiled up at him.

“
There
she is,” he said, pulling off the dented straw hat. What he saw was dark brown hair shot through with strands of silver. A woman of forty-five sitting nearly naked under the unforgiving sun. And yet, my God, how exquisitely lovely she was!

He stretched her out on the blanket. For a moment he looked up. The sky was almost the color of the gentian, as big and blue as he had ever seen it. The wind raked through the tall grasses, sending up lapping sounds, like waves.

FRANK OPENS HIS EYES.
All around his bed, he sees crippled salvage from the fire—a rolled-up carpet reeking of smoke, the two chairs they used for sitting in front of the fireplace, both now missing legs. When he closes his eyes again, the memory is gone. What he does not know is that he will not be able to retrieve her again like that. He will try. He will say to himself,
She loved to joke. She had a wonderful laugh.
But he won’t be able to hear it, not for a very long time.

THE NUMBNESS THAT
propelled him through Mamah’s burial—through the funerals of David and Ernest, through the terrible scenes of mourning when the families of Tom Brunker and Emil Brodelle’s fiancée came to get their bodies—has abandoned him. Now there are only two states: pain and, when he manages to sleep, the absence of pain. It is two weeks since he came home to the devastation at Taliesin. When he can’t sleep, he rises in the middle of the night to sit outside in the darkness. The memory of the death smell can come at any moment to him, filling his nose, sickening his stomach. His back and neck have broken out in boils. He is thin and listless. Even his heart has begun to beat differently. It leaps up all of a sudden, knocks against his ribs, and then races for minutes at a time. The storm of anger that propelled him to write the letter has shrunk to a rock of sorrow inside his gut.

He asks why: Why such a decent woman who wanted only to do good with her life? Why now, after so much struggle, when the life they coveted—together—was finally upon them?

No answers come. He wonders if there is some cosmic logic to it all, that those who stand tallest are the ones that lightning finds. But he tosses aside the notion. To believe that would be as wrongheaded as to believe it was God’s retribution. No, it was the kind of bad luck that life deals out at random. Mamah was in the way of a madman. There is no better explanation.

In the weeks to come, Frank reads that Julian Carlton, too weak to be tried, has died in jail, having revealed nothing of his motives except his anger at Emil. He has starved to death, either from the damage of the acid or from the will to die. Gertrude is found innocent of wrongdoing and is released. For the people of Iowa County whose lives for a few hours that August day were held in a grip of terror, the fears pass. But for Frank, the horror continues.

He allows no one close to him to come near. Anna Wright has visited him time and again, yet he cannot bear the kindness of her or Jennie or his children. He waves his mother away whenever she appears, however stricken her face may be. She has taken to leaving food for him on plates just inside the door, on the floor. Now, if he talks to anyone, it is to the workmen who have come to clear the site. The only relief from the crushing sorrow is work.

There is no hope in trying to communicate with Mamah’s spirit. The closest he can come is to ask himself,
What would she have me do?
He doesn’t need to hear Mamah’s voice inside his head. He has no doubt what her answer would be.