The Women by T. Coraghessan Boyle
When we returned four days later, Daisy was nowhere to be found.
At first I didn’t understand—I went straight to her room, bursting with news of the trip, but no one answered my knock. Pushing the door open, I thrust my head in the room and saw, with a shock, that it had been stripped bare. Her books, her watercolors and hangings, her cosmetics, shoes, magazines and newspapers were gone—even the covers from her bed. Dumbfounded, I went to the wardrobe. There was nothing there but for one crumpled woolen sock in the back corner—and yes, I snatched it up and held it to my nose, desperate suddenly for the scent of her, thinking all the while that there must be some simple explanation, that she’d switched rooms, perhaps over to Hillside or even upstairs, where the views were more amenable. For all her cigarette smoking and urban tastes, Daisy loved the views down the long valley at Taliesin and on more than one occasion she’d told me how jealous she was of Gwendolyn because Gwendolyn had been assigned the room above hers, on the second floor.
I took the stairs two at time. It was late in the afternoon, windows open wide, ladybugs floating randomly up the stairwell, the sound of someone’s gramophone running a naked wire through the atmosphere (Borodin’s Second String Quartet, and I can never hear its sobbing strains without thinking of her, of Daisy, my Daisy, and the infinite sadness of that day). Gwendolyn was sprawled across her bed, still sweating from her exertions in the fields, and though I was so worked up I didn’t think to knock, she didn’t seem at all surprised to find me standing there in the doorway. “It was her father,” she said, without bothering to get up. “Mrs. Wright called him—that’s what everybody’s saying—and he showed up in some sort of fancy car, maybe a Duesenberg or something like that. I barely got to say two words to her, let alone goodbye.”
She was studying the look on my face as if she were a student of the human physiognomy, as if she were mentally measuring me for a marble bust. She’d never much liked me because I’d never much liked her. I tried to say something, but couldn’t seem to get the words out. “What,” she said, all innocence, “didn’t she tell you?”
I skipped dinner that night and hiked out to Stuffy’s to use the pay telephone there. I lost a pocketful of change before I finally got through to her, at her father’s house in Pittsburgh. When she answered, her voice was dead and all I could think was that she’d been drugged. “It’s me,” I said. “I’m coming to you.”
“No,” she said, far away from me, very far, farther than I could have imagined. “You can’t. My father—”
“To hell with your father.” (I wasn’t given to foul language, but I was beside myself.)
“He won’t let me—and my mother either. They’re threatening Mr. Wright with a lawsuit.”
“A lawsuit? For what? Because we love each other?” I looked away absently as a man in overalls and a cloven hat swung through the door and into the tavern. The sun spread yolk over the glass of the phonebooth. It was so hot I felt like a candle burned down to the wick. “You’re twenty years old. They can’t stop us. Nobody can.”
I listened to her breathing over the line. “Tadashi,” she said finally, “you don’t understand. I can’t see you anymore. They’re sending me to London, to stay with my Uncle Peter and Aunt Margaret—I’m going to study design at the Royal Academy. Or at least that’s the idea.”
“London?” I pictured a Dickensian scene, Daisy selling matchsticks on the street, huddled in a garret. My mind was racing. “When?” I said, and I was begging now, stalling for time, trying to calculate the distance from Taliesin to Pittsburgh, a place I’d never been to and of which I had only the vaguest geographic notion.
“Day after tomorrow.”
“But why?” I demanded, yet I already knew the answer to that question, just as I’d known with the girl in college, just as I’d known from the minute Daisy and I laid eyes on each other. Japanese were personae non gratae in this country, the Issei forever barred from attaining citizenship on racial grounds alone, whereas Swedes, Germans, even Italians and Greeks were welcome. “Is it because I’m not white? Is that it?”
She was a long time answering, and all the while a hurricane of pops, scratches and whistles howled through the line, and when she did answer her voice was so reduced I scarcely knew she was speaking. She said, “Yes,” in the way she might have dropped a pebble in the ocean. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
Of course, all this happened a very long time ago and I’m aware that it is peripheral to the task at hand, which is to give as full a portrait of Wrieto-San as I can, and I don’t wish to dwell on the negative, not at all. Suffice to say that I stayed on at Taliesin, grudgingly at first (and perhaps I should have defied Wrieto-San and Daisy’s father and all the rest of the world and driven through the night to Pittsburgh and held her to me so tightly no one could ever have torn us apart, but that sort of demonstrative behavior, is, I’m afraid, alien to me), and then, as the weeks, months and years wore on, in the way of humility and acceptance. Increasingly I came to an ever deeper understanding of the true meaning of apprenticeship and the sacrifice required in service of a great master, and I salved my wounds in the analgesic of work.
Which is precisely why I’d like to relate a happier experience from this period, one in which Wrieto-San again called on me to travel with him on business. It must have been in 1937 or 1938—my memory and the notes I’ve saved from that time are in conflict here—but it was certainly before the great gulf of the war came between us. Wrieto-San, as it happened, was in need of a new automobile—or to be more precise, two new automobiles. We were by then caravanning annually to Taliesin West, which tended to take a toll on our vehicles, and this was the ostensible rationale for our trip to the automobile dealer’s showroom in Chicago, but, in fact, as has been indicated above, Wrieto-San didn’t concern himself so much with needs as he did with wants. He wanted the newest model of Lincoln automobile, the Lincoln Zephyr, and when Wrieto-San wanted something, he always—always, without fail—got it.
I suppose he brought me along that day as a sort of foil, a strange face to put the salesman off his guard, but of course I saw nothing of that—I was simply pleased and honored to be at his side, no matter my function. In any case, he strutted grandly through the door of the showroom, tricked out in all his Beaux Arts finery, the ends of his senatorial tie flowing and his cane tapping at the gleaming tiles of the floor, while I brought up the rear. The salesman—a sort of Babbitt-type, portly, glowing, pleased with himself—came sailing out of the office and across the floor like a liner out on the sea, his hand outstretched in greeting. He could see in a moment that Wrieto-San was someone great, a dynamo, a prince among men, but I’m not sure if he recognized him at first.
“Yes,” Wrieto-San said, studying the man’s hand a moment before clenching it in his own, “I’ve come for this car.” He used his cane as a pointer. The Zephyr stood there in all its aerodynamic beauty, with its grill of chrome shining like the teeth of some fierce predatory animal, the skirts that extended the sculpted chassis and the long tapering wonder of the cab. It was a magnificent thing, elegant and brutal at the same time, its hood concealing the peerless V-12 engine that would tear up the road and transform its competitors into tiny gleams in the rearview mirror. I saw it and wanted it myself. Anyone would have. It was the pinnacle of automotive perfection.
“Good,” the salesman said, rubbing his hands together in anticipation of his commission, and then he launched into a fulsome speech about the car’s features and reliability, going on at such length that Wrieto-San, exasperated, finally cut him off.
“Can it be that you don’t recognize me?” he said.
“Why, yes”—the salesman faltered—“of course I do.”
I heard my own voice then, though I’d intended to remain silent—and watchful. “Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright,” I said, and I had to restrain myself from bowing.
The man slapped his forehead. “Mr. Wright,” he intoned, as if he were offering up a prayer, “of course, of course.
When he was finished, when he got done wriggling and grinning and running a hand through his hair and straightening his tie, he stared expectantly at Wrieto-San, who gave me one of his patented looks (we apprentices liked to call it the boa-constrictor-swallowing-the-rat look), then turned back to the salesman. “I’ll want two of them,” he pronounced. “And I’ll want them cut off here”—an abrupt slashing movement of the cane that sliced an imaginary line from the windshield to the rear window—“so that convertible tops can be installed.” He paused. “They’ll need to be painted, of course, in Cherokee red,” he added, turning to me. “Tadashi, you have the color sample, do you not?”
“Yes, Wrieto-San,” I said, and this time I did bow as I handed over the sheet of paper decorated with the red square.
And then, as that seemed to have concluded the business, Wrieto-San turned to leave, but stopped before he’d gone five steps. “Oh, yes,” he said, his voice as self-assured as any senator’s on the stump, “I’ll want delivery within the month. And I won’t be paying. You do understand that, don’t you?”
We got a great deal of use out of those cars. They were every bit as powerful and rugged—not to mention elegant—as advertised. And they were especially useful for longer treks—to Arizona, to visit clients and construction sites in the late thirties and early forties, when we were busily engaged with the building of Florida Southern College, the Community Church in Kansas City, the Sturges House in California and any number of other far-flung projects. And, of course, their performance was all the more satisfying because Wrieto-San did not pay a nickel for them, nor was he expected to. Just as he’d calculated, the Lincoln Automotive Company was delighted to advertise just what make and model the world’s greatest architect chose to drive.
This anecdote, illustrative as it is both of Wrieto-San’s magnetism and his audacity, brings me to the darkest period of my time with him, if you except the contretemps over Daisy. I’m referring now to events that went far beyond the scale of what any of us at Taliesin or anywhere else in America could have imagined or foreseen—that is, the bombing of Pearl Harbor by my native people, and the consequences it had for me, a Japanese national living by dint of a student visa in the trammeled hills of Wisconsin. Nothing could have protected me from the backlash, not even the power and influence of Wrieto-San himself. Looking back on it, I don’t know that any of us could have done anything differently.
The year prior to the “sneak attack,” as the press liked to call it, I’d gone down to the local police department to register and have my fingerprints taken as required by Section 31 of the Alien Registration Act, but I really hadn’t thought much about it. The militarists in my country had been rattling their sabers, as had their counterparts in Germany and Italy, and it seemed a reasonable precaution on the part of the U.S. government to attempt to keep an eye on citizens of the belligerent countries despite the fact that war had not yet been declared. I suppose I did feel a degree of shame over the posturing of my countrymen (not to mention the savage and dehumanizing way they were depicted in the American press, which, of course, lumped all Japanese in the same barbarian’s boat regardless of outlook or cultural attainments), and yet the experience of registering alongside a dozen or so local Italians and Germans wasn’t particularly troublesome or traumatic in any way. In fact, on that wintry afternoon nearly a year and a half later—December seventh, that is—I’d forgotten entirely about it.
I remember coming in to lunch just after the bell had rung, only to find the dining room deserted. Puzzled, I poked my head in the kitchen. No one was there, not even Mabel, who was as much a fixture of the place as its furniture. The stove was hot, a cauldron of soup steaming atop it, the room warm and redolent. Coffee was brewing. There was half a sliced ham on the countertop and several loaves of bread cooling beside it. Dishcloths, vegetable peels, ladles, knives and all the rest of the culinary appurtenances were scattered about in evidence of recent activity. But no Mabel. And no sign of the apprentice who was to serve as sous-chef and plongeur—or any of my colleagues, who should by that time have been bellying up to the counter with their plates in hand. I went to the window to peer out into the yard (this was at Hillside, where most of the apprentices were now living and working) to see if some disaster had struck in the time it had taken me to leave the drafting room, cross the property to the main house to fetch the set of plans Wrieto-San had sent me for and make my way back again.
It was then that the sound of the radio came to me across the intervening spaces of the building. Herbert’s radio. He had a new Zenith in his room, a very powerful receiver with terrific sound quality and an extended aerial he’d fashioned himself, and we often gathered there to listen to programs at night, but here it was the middle of the day—lunchtime—and I could only wonder at that. I moved toward the sound as if in a trance. The sound grew louder. I heard voices raised in excitement and someone crying “Shush!” as the announcer thundered out the news and then I was there, framed in the doorway in astonishment: Herbert’s room was a scrum of humanity, everyone—even Mabel, even Wrieto-San—wedged in as tightly as commuters on the subway.
The radio crackled ominously. Someone glanced up at me—Wes. “Did you hear?” he said, and they all looked up now, no trace of irony or even awareness in his voice—he was delivering information, that was all: Did you hear?
“Hear what?” I said. “What is it?”
“The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.”
Wrieto-San, as I’m sure so many readers are aware, was a pacifist. During the war years he advised his apprentices to declare themselves conscientious objectors and at least two of them that I know of—John Howe and Herbert Mohl—were imprisoned as a result. Wrieto-San stuck by them. He visited them in jail, sent them foodstuffs, letters, books and other amusements. So it was with me as well. Within an hour of the initial broadcasts, after we’d dined and got back to work in the drafting room, he took me aside. “Tadashi,” he said, “I’m very sorry about all this, this—unfortunate—business.” And he was sorry indeed, not only for the madness that was to come, the loss of life and destruction, but because he so genuinely admired the cultures of the powers the United States and its allies had aligned against. Certainly if the war had been with Australia or Indonesia or the Belgian Congo he would have opposed it, but this went even deeper, this saddened him so that his voice shook and lost its timbre. He looked up at me. We were standing just beyond the doorway to the drafting room, out of sight of the others. “You know what this means, don’t you? ”
I wasn’t thinking. Call me naïve, but I never dreamed that the Americans among whom I’d lived and worked for so long now would see me as a threat to the national security. Or—more significantly—that I would be forced to leave Taliesin, the only sanctuary I’d fully embraced in all my life, the place that was more a home to me than Tokyo itself, and the man who was, at this juncture, as much my father as the man who’d sired me. I was about to slip the question back to him like the baton in a relay race, to say, No, what does it mean?, when his face told me. I was going into exile. Going to prison.
“They’ll be coming for you,” he said. “And by God”—his eyes flared—“I’ll do everything in my power to keep them off of this property, but I’m afraid it’s not going to do much good. Not in the end.”
“But isn’t it possible—?” I protested. I let my arm sweep forward to suggest all that was or should have been included in that realm of possibility, that they would see me as the harmless architectural apprentice I was, as a devotee of Taliesin and a follower of one Master only, and that against all reason or expectation I would be allowed to stay on and assist in the great work of Wrieto-San and humanity itself.
He took a moment. I could hear my fellow apprentices chattering away excitedly, war in the air, this place Pearl Harbor stamped suddenly in all our minds though none of us could have pinpointed it on a map
A picture of that vast polar country came to me—a place I’d never been to, but which seemed an eternal wintry Wisconsin spread from one sea to the other—and my dubiety must have shown on my face.
Wrieto-San reached out his hand then and laid it on my shoulder, a gesture I will always remember for the spontaneous warmth of it, as Wrieto-San was never physical with anyone, always standing erect and proper and respecting what today would be called one’s personal space. “Whatever you need,” he said. “Anything. Just ask.” He dropped his hand and shoved it deep into his pocket, then turned and strode back into the drafting room, crying out, “Good God, it’s like a meat locker in here! Can’t any of you keep up a fire?”
The next day, though it was snowing and Taliesin loomed amidst the frozen landscape like an ark locked in the fastness of an unreachable sea, they came for me. Two men from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, showing badges and faces as grim as boot heels. I’d thought of hiding in the stables, of asking Herbert or Wes to lie for me and say I’d fled to Canada, but that was the way of cowardice, not honor. That was the way that would have implicated them—and Wrieto-San—and I couldn’t take it. Instead, though I was as close to tears as I’ve ever been in my adult life, I came forward, striding purposefully through that miracle of organic architecture and aesthetic purity, and bowed to the two men in the heavy twill suits and tan overcoats. Shikata ga nai, is what I said to myself—it can’t be helped. And then I bowed to Wrieto-San, to Mrs. Wright and my fellow apprentices who’d gathered there in the living room as if for a Saturday night’s entertainment, and gave myself up to the snow and my innocence and the two steely representatives of the country my country had wronged.
But I see, once again, that I’ve gone on too long here. Suffice to say that I experienced the usual abuses and deprivations, the local jail (or should I say hoosegow?) at first, then, after President Roosevelt issued his infamous executive order 9066, removal to a relocation center in Arkansas and finally to the Tule Lake camp in the north of California, where the most radical and suspect aliens were interned. I won’t take time here to describe the appalling conditions of the uninsulated tarpaper barracks into which we were crowded, the lack of cooking facilities or waste and sewage disposal, the threats and insults of the guards or the anomalous and quite mad fact that hundreds of South American Japanese, many of whom no longer even spoke the language of Dai Nippon, were extradited and interned with us. Nor will I say anything about the national administrator of the internment program, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, except to repeat his rationale for all this suffering, humiliation and deprivation of basic human rights not only for resident aliens like myself but for the Nisei who were born in America—that is, “A Jap’s a Jap.”