The Women by T. Coraghessan Boyle
As it developed, that wasn’t the end of it.
We’d no sooner come up the drive and rolled into the courtyard than a handful of apprentices, curious over our late arrival and eager for any sort of diversion from the routine, streamed out of the studio at the sound of the Cord’s mighty engine in its dying fall. Wes was in the vanguard. “My God,” he boomed, bursting through the outer door. “What happened? Was it an accident?” In the next moment everyone had crowded round, goggling at Wrieto-San’s bandages and taking in the spectacle of me sitting behind the wheel in the privileged position, my color high and a shining stippled contusion painting my right cheekbone.
“Mr. Wright, are you okay?” a voice cried out.
“Mr. Wright—do you need help?”
“Mr. Wright?”
“Tadashi, what is it, what happened?”
Wrieto-San threw back the door of the Cord, waved away a dozen eager arms with a bellicose flick of his cane, and climbed out of the car to stand there erect in the drive, his shoulders thrown back and his eyes on fire, apparently none the worse for the loss of blood and the blast of icy wind. There were dull brown stains on the lapels of his overcoat and I noticed them now for the first time. His shirt—as crisply white and freshly starched as an apprentice could make it just that morning—was torn and bloodied and the crown of his hat was crushed. He said nothing. Just glared round him as if every man and woman present were responsible for what had befallen him, then turned on his heel and marched to the house. Only when he’d flung open the door and stepped into the shadows of his private quarters where none of us could follow, did he appear to break down. “Olgivanna!” we heard him bray in the voice of a schoolboy who’d skinned his knee on the playground. “Olgivanna, where in hell are you?”
As soon as the door slammed shut, everyone turned to me. I was still seated behind the wheel of the Cord, my hair an unholy mess, my teeth rattling with the cold, reluctant to let go of the moment. Daisy was the one who brought me out of it. She was right there, leaning into me, her face suspended in the light of the windows as if it were floating free. She was unguardedly beautiful. She was talking to me. “Tadashi, come on now, we’re dying to know what happened. And you must come in out of the cold—and have something to eat. I asked Emma to put a plate aside for you—”
And then her fingers were entwined in mine and we were heading for the kitchen, three-quarters of the apprenticeship at our heels even as I tried to reconstruct the story amidst a storm of shouts and expostulations. I was standing at the counter—pinned to it actually by the crush of bodies—an oven-warmed plate of plain wholesome gravy-drenched food in front of me, and everyone was talking at once. Wes, the giant, whose head and torso and massive shoulders rose above us as if he were standing on stilts, cried out in a high strained voice: “It was Dunleavy, then—is that who it was? Dunleavy?”
“Yes,” I told him and for the sixth time in as many minutes described the scene outside the hardware store and my part in it, all the while rubbing the side of my face (which hardly stung at all) to bring attention to the badge of honor I would wear for the next week and a half.
I didn’t eat. Couldn’t. The Fellowship—my companions and bunk-mates, mild men and women who honored ideas and the aesthetics of design above any physical expression of emotion—had been transformed into vigilantes, a lynch mob in the making. It was decided, by whom I no longer remember, that we would pile into a car—into my car, the Stutz—and drive to the Dunleavy farm and have it out. “We’ll horsewhip him!” Wes roared as we charged out into the courtyard and he, Herbert, Edgar and I catapulted into the seats while the others shook their fists and hooted like Comanches. I fired up the engine and tore down the dark hill and into the night, their calls echoing in my ears.
It was Mrs. Dunleavy who came to the door in answer to our thunderous knock. She was in a housedress, wearing an apron. Her hair had fallen loose in a sloppy scatter of pins and loose ends. It was, I noticed now, the color of barnyard ordure. Her mouth began to work but she was too startled to speak.
“We want your husband,” Wes said, and there was an ugly edge to his voice.
“And your son. Your son too,” Herbert put in. He was just behind me, as wispy and pale as a child, and Edgar stood behind him, slapping a braided leather whip against one thigh. We were four. We were caught up in the moment. We thought only of vengeance.
I saw comprehension seep into Mrs. Dunleavy’s eyes and along with it, fear and hate. Behind her, appearing on the scene like extras, were the two boys I’d seen that day just over a year ago when I was a young man of urban inclinations, lost in the wilds of the Wisconsin farm country, and their dog, bewhiskered and alert, a low warning growl caught in its throat. At that juncture I was going at full throttle, far beyond the pale of normalcy or civilized behavior. I actually spat on the floor between her two slippered feet. “He attacked the Master,” I snarled, and it was as if I were reading the lines of a play, “—and now he’s going to pay.”
I don’t know if Farmer Dunleavy or his rubicund son were at home that night (though there’s no reason to imagine they weren’t—it wasn’t as if rural Wisconsin abounded in cultural divertissements or that these ignorant half-civilized bumpkins would have made use of them if there were) because Mrs. Dunleavy, with a suddenness and swiftness of movement that startled us all, slammed the door in our faces and drove the bolt to with a resounding clap. After which she apparently went directly to the telephone and called the sheriff. We stood on the porch in the faint yellowish glow of the porch light (until it was abruptly extinguished from inside the house), privately questioning our rashness and wondering what to do next, if only to save face with one another. Wes looked at me. I looked at Herbert. Herbert looked at Edgar. Then Wes turned back to the door and began hammering its cracked pine panels with the anvil of his fist. “I know you’re in there, you coward!” he shouted, amidst a host of threats and accusations. “Come on out now! Take it like a man!” I began to feel embarrassed.
A good deal of time went by—fifteen minutes or more—while we shuffled around on the porch, muttering imprecations and giving out with muffled yelps of outrage for each other’s benefit. There was no sound at all from inside the house, but for the occasional distant quarrel of the dog. I don’t know which of us picked up the stone and shattered the front window, but the sound of the fragmenting glass operated on us like an alarm and we all broke simultaneously for the car.
Unfortunately, the sheriff was waiting for us just off State Highway 23 when we made the turnoff for Taliesin. All four of us were placed under arrest on a charge of assault and escorted, in handcuffs, to the county jail. The Bearcat was impounded. And we spent two days there, locked up like common criminals, before we came to trial, where we were allowed to plead guilty and absorb fines of fifty dollars each.
My father, rest his soul, never learned of it. But Wrieto-San did, of course. And he, in his turn, took Farmer Dunleavy to court, where he arrived in all his pomp and glory, swaggering behind his cane and surrounded by a formidable group of male apprentices (I am second from his right in the celebrated photograph that appeared in the Spring Green, Madison and Chicago papers). The farmer was found guilty of assaulting Wrieto-San, lectured by the judge, sentenced to a week in jail and fined, after which he and his threadbare family found they could no longer sweat a living from the local soil and joined the impoverished hordes heading west for the promise of California. Needless to say, I’m not particularly proud of the role I played in all of this, nor of the fact that in the view of the officials of Iowa County, Wisconsin, I remain to this day a petty criminal, if not the very mark and model of the undesirable alien. In Wrieto-San’s eyes, however, I was elevated into the select company of the very first rank of “his boys,” so that in the months and years to come I would hear him wax sentimentally—and boastfully too—of how his boys had stood up for him when the chips were down. He would pause in the middle of one of his perorations, his eyes growing distant. “
I see that perhaps I’ve gone on at too great a length concerning this period of Wrieto-San’s life, in what is meant to serve, after all, merely as an introduction, but I do think these recollections should help to illuminate the character of the man whose greatness has touched us all. In closing, I should mention that my distinguished collaborator, Seamus O’Flaherty, is, in addition to the aforementioned translations, the author of two novels, The Ladies’ Heat (not what you might think—its subject is women’s track and field) and Kit and Caboodle (also a surprise—this work deals with a fictional detective agency established in Okinawa by two Englishmen, Jonas Kit and Malcolm Caboodle, in the years immediately following the conclusion of the second war). At this point, sadly, neither has found a publisher. And yet, as I’m sure you’ll agree, O’Flaherty-San brings a unique artistic perspective to the text here as it unravels backward in time to attempt to define the true essence of Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, Wrieto-San, Wrieto-San, banzai!—the guiding light and enduring genius of all working architects, past, present and future.
CHAPTER 1: DIES IRAE
August 1914. There was a war on in Europe, the Archduke Ferdinand assassinated, the old alignments breaking down, trenches dug, want and terror and ruin spreading outward like ripples on the surface of a pond, but the rumor of it barely touched him. Nothing touched him. A week ago he’d been as secure and genuinely happy as he’d ever been in his life, Mamah blossoming along with Taliesin, working on a book of her own and winning over the neighbor women with her God-given grace and charm and the long trailing diminuendo of her laugh, the scandals behind them and the hounds of the press onto other shames and miseries, his own work on Midway Gardens coming to fruition in a last-minute frenzy of alterations, substitutions, delays and shortages and the mad concentrated efforts of a cadre of men working against deadline, just the way he liked it. But now he was alone. Taliesin was in ashes. And Mamah was dead.
Past midnight on a day he couldn’t name—Monday, Tuesday, what difference did it make?—he was sitting on the hill above the ruins of the house, crickets alive around him, roaring as if their lives would never end and the frost never come, fireflies aping the stars overhead, the grass lush, the trees burdened with fruit and the bitter reek of ash hanging over everything. Five hundred copies of the Wasmuth portfolio, printed on the finest German stock, were still smoldering in the basement—even now he could segregate the smell of them, a thin persistent chemical stink of colored plates, elaborated plans and burned-out ideas—and when he turned his head he could see the deeper darkness, black smoke against the black sky and the dense textured shadows of the freestanding chimneys that were like the remains of a civilization gone down. Everything was still. And then, suddenly, a noise came at him, abrasive and harsh, the grind of boot heels amongst the cinders, and he caught his breath. There, a quick flare of light—a match lit and snuffed. Joseph, he thought, it’s only Joseph, the farmer’s son he’d hired to walk the property with a rifle to keep out the looters and anyone else who might want to do him harm.
Further harm. Fatal harm. The Barbadian was in the Dodgeville jail, but who knew if he had collaborators, a whole army of disaffected Negroes in white service jackets hunkered in the bushes over their hatchets and knives? He almost wished it were so. At least then he could do something to release the grief and rage boiling up in him. Literally boiling up. His back, from tailbone on up into the hair at the nape of his neck, was a plague of boils, inflamed suppurating sores, and he’d never in his life suffered so much as a pimple or blemish. It was as if what the gossipmongers were saying was true and verifiable, that divine justice had come down on his head for violating the laws of God and man in taking Mamah outside of marriage and then compounding the sin by establishing her in Taliesin as if to rub all their noses in it. Mamah had paid the ultimate price, yet he’d been spared by a fluke of fate, away in Chicago and so pressed and harried he’d taken to sleeping right there on the job site in a pile of shavings. Spared, as the editorialists had it, so he could twist and suffer for the rest of his life. Arson, murder, desolation, boils. What next—frogs dropping down from the heavens? Locusts?
They called it sin, the preachers denouncing him from their pulpits, crowing, gloating, and the newspapermen right there alongside them, but was there any such thing? He didn’t believe in it any more than Mamah or Ellen Key did, not when it came to honest and loving relations between women and men, but how else could you explain what had happened? It was the God of Isaiah come down to lay his hand over the hillside, the God before whom Ein Tad83 had made him tremble when he was a boy. The words were on his lips now, involuntary and poisonous, but he could no more stop them than he could go back in time to stay the murderer’s hand: “ ‘The grass withereth,’ ” he said aloud, the sound of his voice an assault on the solitude of the night, “ ‘the flower fadeth, because the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass.’ ”
He’d buried her himself. In a plain pine box fashioned by Billy Weston with his two burned hands and gashed scalp and it was no trouble for Billy, the smallest thing, because Billy was making a box of his own, child-size, for his son Ernest, murdered alongside Mamah and the others and laid out on the stones like a burnt offering. The box stood there in the courtyard, smelling of sap and shavings, isolate and actual, a thing he could touch and feel and run his hands over. White pine. The planed edges. But it was too small, wasn’t it? Too reduced and confined for a spirit like hers, and his first thought was that Billy must have miscalculated. He kept stalking round it, unable to grasp the problem, to discover the solution in the conjoined boards and the light, shifting grain of the wood—architecture, it was only architecture—till his son John found him there. “Too small, too small,” he kept muttering, closer then to breaking down than at any time since he’d stepped off the train. “No, Papa,” John told him, “it’s just right,” and it was, he understood that finally. It was.
There were sickles hanging on hooks in the barn and he’d gone out there and fitted one to the grip of his hand, then took down the whetstone and sharpened the blade till it shone in the dense shifting August light. When he was satisfied he strode out to her flower garden and cut it to the ground in a fury of wide slashing strokes till his hands were wet with the ichor of the stems, a whole field of cut flowers lying there in sheaves, enough to fill a casket and a raw hole in the ground too. He chased off the undertaker. Chased them all off, the newspapermen, the farmers and their wives, the gawkers and gapers and bloodsuckers, the ones who never knew her and never would. He was the one who knew her, the only one, and he was the one who bent to bathe her in blooms, her own blooms, the ones she’d toiled over herself, petals opening to the sun and closed now forever. 84 Then he hitched up the sorrel team and led the funeral procession down the drive from the scorched ruins, along the county road to the Lloyd Jones family chapel and the churchyard behind it.
The service was brief because there was nothing to say, not as far as he was concerned, the blow so heavy, the weight of the pain, the punishment, and then he sent them all away—his sister Jennie, his son John, his brother-in-law Andrew Porter and the handful of others—and took up the shovel himself. Her husband—her former husband, a decent man, decent enough—wasn’t there. Nor had he wanted to be. He was on the Chicago train, the train that stopped at every town and crossing, with two caskets of his own, caskets smaller even than the one Billy Weston had made for his son. There was the soft swish of the dirt sifting down into the hole, stones rattling against the planed corners of the box, the thump of a clod, a dangle of severed roots. Rain coming. The dirt smell. And then finally there was the raised mound and he was tamping it with the butt of the shovel, dusk closing down against a sky roiled with clouds. The heat—the August heat—settled in till it was like another kind of fire burning up out of the ground. When the rain did come sometime past midnight, he was still there and though it soaked h
But now, as he sat in the wet grass of the hillside and watched the moving point of light that was Joseph Williams’ cigarette bisecting the planes of the night, a new feeling came over him, as if the ligature round his heart had been loosened by a single coil. She was dead and he wasn’t and no amount of brooding or sorrow could amend that. It was as if she’d never existed or existed in another sphere altogether, a kind of permanent limbo to which he had no access. She was gone, in spirit and flesh, but here was the concrete evidence of her—Taliesin. What was left of it, anyway, the studio and back rooms, the garages and stables standing forlorn and abandoned, the place of the hill no arsonist or murderer could ever eradicate. He’d built it for her, as a refuge from the loose tongues and prying eyes of the biddies and gossips and Sunday saints who’d made her life a hell, and in that moment he understood that he would build it again, all over again, as a monument to her.
It was the least he could do—or no, the only thing he could do, the right thing, the moral thing—and as he stared into the darkness where the main rooms had stood he was already devising plans against the backdrop of the night, seeing a new way to configure what had been razed to coordinate with the portion of the structure the fire had spared. And this was ordained too, else why had the conflagration stopped short of consuming the whole of the place if he hadn’t been meant to rebuild?