Loving Frank (6 page)

  1909  

CHAPTER
7

April 12, 1909

Dearest Mamah,

We have survived another winter though it’s still frozen here, and I find myself rounding out. I know I am entirely too old to be bouncing another child on my knee. But here I am (happy to boot), due in late September. I’m not looking forward to a summer of confinement, though, as Alden is away much of the time. How did I overlook that little detail when I agreed to marry a mining engineer?

That’s where you come in. Why don’t you and the children come out for a visit? Boulder is the most beautiful spot on earth in summer. There are outings by rail into the mountains to collect wildflowers, and plenty of interesting lectures over at the Chautauqua camp. You would be entirely in your element. And we could have a grand time catching up. Say you will! I’ll make sure you have fun.

Give my love to Edwin, and ask his forgiveness in advance if I steal you away for a couple of weeks. Better still, tell him to come. Kisses all around.

Mattie

Mamah arrived in the field first. She maneuvered the Studebaker along the one road that led to the undeveloped lots just a mile north of town. She and Frank had met there twice the previous spring. The road was surprisingly dry for April.

She drove past the lampposts that had been installed last year in early summer but never lit. The poles were waiting for houses and people and lawns.

“Are you going to class?” Edwin had asked her this morning. He spoke carefully most of the time these days, uncertain what might set her off.

“No.”

“But I thought you loved it.”

She’d sighed. The thought of climbing on the elevated train and getting out to Hyde Park, then sitting through a two-hour lecture, made her weary rather than eager, as she used to feel.

“Herrick bores me,” she said. “How is your grapefruit?”

“Dandy.”

“And work?”

“Wagner Electric still stands.”

“I’m sorry, Edwin. I haven’t asked you a thing about work. I know you’ve had contract negotiations, and I haven’t—”

“It’s all right.”

Mamah looked out of the dining room window. “It’s just that…the sky has been so gray lately.”

“Not today. You need to get out in the sun. It’s glorious out there.” He pecked her on the cheek and left.

When Mattie’s note had arrived that morning, Mamah was jubilant. She searched the newspaper for train schedules, even though it would be another month before she could leave. Around two, just as she sat down at her secretary to write to Mattie, Louise tapped on the door.

“Mr. Wright is here, ma’am. With another man.”

Mamah felt the pen in her hand start to quiver. She walked out into the living room to find Frank and the stranger staring at the row of stained-glass windows along the west side of the room. A wave of anger swept over her.

“The horizontal line is the line of domesticity, of course,” Frank was saying.

Mamah cleared her throat, and both men turned toward her.

“Mrs. Cheney,” Frank said, bowing elegantly. “Forgive us for intruding upon you. This is Mr. Kuno Francke, a visiting scholar from Germany.”

Francke bent low, then kissed her hand.

“He’s come from Germany to see my work. I’ve already traipsed him through three other houses. Do you mind if I show him around your home?”

“Not at all.” Mamah shot a furious look at Frank while Mr. Francke gazed at the ceiling.

“Mrs. Cheney speaks fluent German,” Frank said.

“Is that so?” the man said in a heavy accent. “Forgive me if I butcher the English, but I’m practicing. I am trying to convince your architect that his talents are wasted in America. The avant-garde in German architecture is head and shoulders above the Modern architects here. Except for Mr. Wright, who I think leads them all. He would be far better served to practice in Germany right now.”

“Well, I can’t think of a better place for him,” Mamah said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I was just about to get dressed to go out.”

When she headed to the hallway, Frank hurried to catch her. “Meet me in the field tonight. Nine o’clock. Will you?”

She didn’t answer him as she slipped into the bedroom and closed the door.

Batter my heart, three-personed God. Stop me in my tracks. Please.

Driving toward the north prairie, she found herself praying in sonnets. She looked around, half expecting to see a flash of bright light. But the sky was black and still.

As much as she could tell in the dark, no foundations had been dug since they had last met. The field remained as it had been, marked off by a few roads, laid out in a grid pattern.

Mamah thought about her departure from home.

“Meeting tonight,” she’d called out to Edwin. She wore a simple dress that was neither plain nor fine, a “meeting” dress.

“Go! Get out of the house and enjoy yourself!” he called back.

Now she sat alone in his car in the middle of a dark field. She knew what the prairie looked like by day—patches of grasses and trees. She and Frank had dared to lie there on the ground at sunset last summer. They had felt surprisingly safe, hidden in the maize-colored savannah, the smell of steamy earth wafting over them. But tonight, in the waning moon’s light, Mamah could see only the silhouettes of bur oaks spreading their ghoulish arms against the night sky.

It was nine o’clock, and Frank had not appeared. She was considering leaving when she saw the lights of a car turn onto the road leading to the development. A cold excitement swept over her, and she took a blanket from the backseat.

What if it wasn’t Frank? What if the developer had decided to come out to the field for some reason? How could she explain herself, sitting out here in the dark? She opened the door and slid from the driver’s seat, then hid behind the car, wrapped in the blanket.

Batter my heart. Batter my heart.

The car stopped twenty feet from where she stood. She peeked around the fender again and saw Frank leap from his car and race toward hers. Mamah stepped from behind the auto.

Frank didn’t speak to her at all, only held on to her, rocking her back and forth in his arms.

THEY SAT IN THE STUDEBAKER,
looking out at the fields around them. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness. In the dim light, she could discern green shoots pushing up through the brittle shafts of old grasses.

“You look so lovely right now.”

“Shhh.”

“I mean it.”

“Don’t try to charm me.”

“I thought you understood.”

“You could have sent some word, Frank. I’ve been living inside hell.”

“I wanted to come to you. There hasn’t been a day…”

Mamah felt something surrender inside. She took his hand and brushed her fingers over its familiar shape.

“She’s not going to abide by the agreement,” he said. “She’s off in her own world. Do you know how she spends her days? Filling a scrapbook with sentimental poems about fatherhood and clippings of the children’s hair. We have not shared a bedroom for over a year, yet she won’t hear a word about divorce.”

“It’s all so sad.”

Frank was silent. When he spoke, his voice was heavy with despair. “Henry Ford was at the studio this week. Monday.” He stared out the side window. “It was a disaster.”

“Why? What happened?”

“He set up a meeting about a country house. When he showed up, I simply…I couldn’t gin up an ounce of enthusiasm.”

She watched the outline of his face.

“It’s not the only commission I’ve lost lately. I’ve hit some kind of wall. I just can’t live this life anymore. There’s this awful doom I feel, that I’ll have to spend the rest of my days spitting out houses in Oak Park until I fall over at the table.” He emitted a grim sigh, tapped a finger on the steering wheel. “Strange, isn’t it, that I have a man of Henry Ford’s stature show up at my studio—that some recognition finally comes after all these years—and it means almost nothing.”

“I understand.”

“You know what’ll be built in this field someday? Little boxes iced with stucco that some horse’s ass will call ‘prairie houses.’ Complete with ‘Frank Lloyd Wright windows’ bought for nothing from some cheap glass company in Chicago. Do you see the irony of it?” When he looked at her, she saw something new, a wounded outrage. “I’ve been a pariah in this town since I moved here, and now I’ve got imitators! They think it’s just a matter of stripping the frills off, like the dress reformers. The sons of bitches don’t have the intelligence to steal the right ideas.”

“Clients who understand will pay for the real thing, Frank.”

“You know what’s wrong?” He moved his fingers through her hair. “I want you, Mame. Next to me. I want to go out into the world and look at things with clear eyes, the way I did when I was twenty. I feel as if I’ve hardly
lived.
I need time away from here—a spiritual adventure—” He was quiet, as if calculating something. “Kuno Francke isn’t the only German who’s after me. There’s a printer in Berlin named Ernst Wasmuth. He does high-quality art books, and he’s convinced we could make good money by publishing a monograph of my work. It would be a statement of what I’ve done. Hopefully it will generate commissions. I don’t know. But I’ve talked to him about going over to Germany in August.”

“Nobody is doing the work you do, Frank. A monograph is your ticket to an international reputation,” she said. “You have to go. It’s the next step for you.”

“You don’t understand. It will be enormous work getting the renderings ready. I could be gone a year.”

Inside her, sorrow was rising like a wave. She crossed her arms, pressed her fingernails into her flesh.

“Come with me, Mamah. You love Berlin—you’ve told me so. Take a holiday—women take tours all the time. Call it what you want. Just stay a couple of months so we can be together. We could give it a try and see if it works.”

“If only it were that simple.” She shook her head. “In a way, it’s easier for you that Catherine knows. I nearly told Edwin, but when you didn’t contact me, I backed away from it.” Mamah felt hot salty tears seep down her cheeks and into her mouth. “I thought you didn’t want me anymore.”

“Mamah…” Frank said. He pulled her toward him.

“There are two of us in this,” she said. “Can’t you see how impossible it all is? I can’t pick up where we left off, sneaking around again. It wears too hard on me.” She shifted uneasily on the leather of the seat. “I’m going away for a while to Colorado to stay with some friends, Mattie and Alden Brown. Mattie is due in September, and she needs company. I’m going out there with the children as soon as John finishes school.”

Frank looked at her, stunned. “You’re not.”

“I am.”

“Jesus.” He sighed. “Look, I’ll wait until September if I know that—”

Mamah shook her head. “I need to get away, too, Frank, from Edwin and Oak Park. And you. I need to sort things out.” She wiped her eyes and shrugged. “I have to find the path that’s right for me.”

After a few minutes, Mamah watched him climb disconsolately into his car and wait while she lit her headlights and drove off. She had done the right thing, the hard thing. But there wasn’t an ounce of relief in it.

CHAPTER
8

M
amah and Edwin looked up at the same moment when they heard the hammering. The June sun was already blazing at eight
A.M.
, and the concrete stoop was warm under her feet. Leaning against the Belknaps’ house was a tall ladder. On it, a carpenter carefully pieced clapboard strips into a second-floor window opening.

“How odd,” Edwin said, pulling off his suit coat and flinging it over his arm. “That’s a bedroom closet window, isn’t it? Why on earth would they want to board it up?”

Mamah gnawed at a cuticle. “I don’t know.”

He shrugged. “People are strange. A perfectly good window, even if it’s in a closet.” Edwin kissed her forehead, then walked out to the street.

She slouched on the stoop. A woodpecker drilled a tree somewhere in counterpoint to the hammering. She noticed that tiny box elder seedlings had sprung up in her flower bed from the winged seeds of the neighbors’ tree. She bent down and yanked them out of the soil.

I wish you were cruel, Edwin,
she thought.
I wish you were devious or lazy or selfish. Anything but kind.

Mamah looked up at the window and wondered what the neighbor girls had seen last summer. Was it Frank’s hand over hers, a kiss, or worse? And why were the Belknaps boarding up the window now? She pictured the girls continuing their watching through the winter, hoping to see more. Had they been caught by their mother and confessed?

Only three days left before she boarded a train for Boulder. Three days. But she saw clearly now what she needed to do.
When Edwin comes home tonight,
she thought,
I’ll tell him the truth. Before someone else does.

Mamah’s sister Lizzie appeared from around the corner of the house, headed out somewhere. She came to a halt when she saw Mamah’s face. “Are you all right? You look ill.”

“No.”

“No what? Are you sick?”

“Do you have a minute to talk?”

Lizzie’s eyes traveled up the ladder to the boarded-up window. Her face registered guilt when she looked back at Mamah, as if she had been caught in a lie of her own. “Of course, Mame.” She put down her satchel and sat down on the stoop.

“I’m not sick, Liz, but I’m not well, either. There’s something…” Mamah backed up and started over. “Ed and I haven’t been happy lately. I suppose you know that.”

Lizzie reached into her bag and pulled out her cigarettes. She handed one to Mamah, then took her time lighting it and one for herself. “Is it Frank Wright this is about?”

“So you know.” Mamah glanced at Lizzie’s face but could tell nothing. Clear of emotion as an alabaster egg. “Does Edwin know, too?”

“I’m not sure how he could miss it.” Lizzie’s tone was matter-of-fact. “But I suppose it’s possible.”

Mamah stared at the pavement, her stomach in knots. “I’ve lost myself, Liz.”

Her sister drew deeply on her cigarette. “People make mistakes. You can fix this.”

“No. I mean, it’s more than Frank. I married Edwin and slowly…” She shrugged. “Right now I feel as though if I stay in this house, if I go on pretending much longer, whatever is left of me is going to just smother.”

Lizzie looked into her eyes. “Frank Wright isn’t helping your situation.”

“But he is. Frank made me remember who I was before. I can
talk
to him, Liz. I could never really talk to Ed.” Mamah laughed sadly. “Sometimes I think the reason he and I have lasted as long as we have is because you are at the dinner table to keep the conversation going.” She wiped an eye with her wrist.

“Go clear out your head, Mamah.” Lizzie patted her shoulder. “If you want to leave the children back here with me, go have yourself a vacation.”

“No, I want them with me, and they’re excited about going. But thanks, Lizzie.”

“I have a feeling you’ll see things differently with a little distance.” Lizzie stubbed out her cigarette, then took the butt back to the alley trash can. When she returned, she ran her hand over Mamah’s tousled head. “I’m headed downtown for a while,” she said. Her voice was sad.

Mamah watched her sister walk toward the street. When she was out of sight, Mamah looked down at the flower bed along the porch stoop. She and Lizzie had planted it together last spring. Mamah had dug in plants donated by a neighbor—hollyhocks, spiky penstemon, huge-leaved rhubarb. Lizzie had gone out and bought low-growing alyssum plants that made a fragrant white blanket beneath Mamah’s raucous giants, somehow managing to pull together the whole crazy quilt with one soft stroke.

The alyssum was pure Lizzie. She was continually moving quietly in the background, making things work. Only three years older than Mamah, she’d always seemed a whole generation beyond her. She was reserved, ladylike, with the kind of cool grace their elder sister, Jessie, had had.

The two of them had been stars in the sky to Mamah when she was small. As the elder children, they’d had their own society, up to the day Jessie died giving birth. After that, when Mamah and Edwin took in Jessie’s newborn baby to raise, Mamah and Lizzie became a team. The space below the new house that Frank had envisioned as a built-in garage had become Lizzie’s apartment instead.

People shook their heads in puzzlement that Lizzie had not married. They wondered aloud if there was a worm inside that perfect apple, maybe a bitter heart from an early love affair. Mamah knew different.

There had been suitors, all right, but Lizzie preferred her independence. She had acquired a family by happenstance. What need had she of a husband? She liked going off every day to her job as a teacher at the Irving Elementary School. She liked coming home and smoking cigarettes to her heart’s content, with no one to apologize to. She did her part—more than her part—in raising little Jessie. After their sister’s death, she’d taken on the roles Jessie had played: organizer of holidays, maker of picture albums, rememberer of great-aunts’ names, keeper of Borthwick lore.

Lizzie was as grand an auntie to John and Martha and Jessie as any child could hope for. But family life happened upstairs. Without saying a word, she trained all of them to respect her privacy. Her rooms downstairs were sacrosanct—one visited only when invited.

At Christmastime, Mamah loved to enter Lizzie’s world. Every square inch of the apartment was covered with ribbons and paper and gift boxes that were wrapped or about to be. She was like that—wildly generous. She had paid for much of Mamah’s graduate school out of her meager salary; it was something she was proud of. But she was not the kind of person to loudly demand equal pay, even if she resented that her salary was lower than the male teachers’. She had never been a suffrage marcher, though her heart was in the cause. She guarded her opinions.

No, Lizzie preferred to live unobtrusively, going about her business pleasantly, her delicate antennae cueing her to slip out of a room when talk turned private or uncomfortable. She had lived with Edwin and Mamah nearly all of their married life. It struck Mamah for the first time that other women might have found that trying. But not once had it been a burden. Everybody loved Lizzie, especially the children. Edwin showed her great deference, and she returned it.

She’s the one who should have married Edwin,
Mamah thought.
Lizzie would have made him a great companion.

She went inside then and composed a note to Mattie.

Good news. I’ve decided to stay longer than two weeks. Do you think you can find a boardinghouse for the children and me? If we stay the summer in Boulder, I refuse to burden you with company the whole time. Will you do that for us, dear Mattie? We’re all bursting to see you.

Fondly,
Mamah