The Women by T. Coraghessan Boyle
The waiter handed her the menu as if he’d just found it in the street, and she waved it away—they both knew perfectly well that she’d all but memorized it and wanted only deux oeufs, poached, accompanied by a pair of those little English sausages and the sauté of tomatoes, avec café noir sans sucre. They both knew, and yet every encounter was played out as if it were the first, as if they were players in an Oscar Wilde farce. Then the waiter was gone and at some point the coffee appeared and she reached beneath the table for her bag and the newspapers Leora had sent her from Chicago. She liked to keep up on events in the States, especially now that the war had broken out, but she always had, because as Frenchified as she’d become she was still an American girl at heart, Maude Miriam Noel, the Belle of Memphis. Just the other night, at a gathering in her flat over a very nice Beaujolais and croquettes of crab she’d produced herself, an Englishman by the name of Noel Rutherford—Noel, and wasn’t that a cozy coincidence?—had told her how utterly charming her accent was. “You’re from the South, I presume,” he’d said—“Richmond, perhaps? Or perhaps deeper? Let me guess: Charlotte? Savannah?” And she’d smiled up at him—he was tall, lean, with that constricted muscular energy so many of the English seemed to cultivate, his hair as sleek and dark as an otter’s, and she’d begun to see real possibilities in him—and positively drawled, “Oh, no, honey, you’ve got me awl wrong. I’m a Memphis girl.”
She spread the papers out before her. Took a sip of her coffee. Of course, the past year had been hard on her, what with the way she’d been thrown over by René and that unfortunate incident with the carving knife—and she would have stabbed him, she really and truly would have and gladly gone to the Santé Prison for it, if he’d only stood still long enough. And there was her cat. Mr. Ribbons—or Monsieur Ribbons, as she liked to call out from the door and watch him scamper across the street, his tail held erect above him. When he’d begun to spit up blood, she immediately suspected the crabbed odious horse-faced woman downstairs of poisoning him, and there’d been another regrettable incident over that, though the veterinarian assured her that the animal had died of natural causes. Yes. Certainly. Natural causes. What else could it be? At the thought of it she looked up sharply over her reading glasses, riveting the waiter with a look, which he ignored, and where were her eggs? Had they sent out to the provinces for them? Did it take a Cordon Bleu chef to set a pot of water boiling and dice a few tomatoes over a pan?
She was irritable, and she would have been the first to admit it. It was the war, the uncertainty, the rumors. Everyone said it would be over in six months, but what if it wasn’t? What if the Germans pushed through and marched into Paris? What if there were shortages, rationing? Would the cafés be deserted? Would her landlady raise her rent? She’d thought of going back to Chicago, to Norma, but that was distasteful to her in so many ways she could hardly count them. So many of her friends—the Americans and English, at any rate—had already left, the Belknaps, Clarissa Hodge, the Payne Whitneys. Even her closest friend and confidante, Marie-Thérèse, had gone away to the country, deserting her when she most needed someone to confide in, and not just over René but the creeping fear that started as a kind of upset of her stomach and radiated all the way down to her toes and back up her spine to the nape of her neck, the fear that everything she knew and loved was wearing down and coming to some awful end.
The waiter sauntered up with the heavy ceramic plate and slipped it onto the table as if he were placing a bet at Auteuil before vanishing like a magician, only to reappear in the depths of the café, a freshly lit cigarette jutting from his mouth. She spread her napkin across her lap, adjusted the newspaper and her reading glasses, and cut into one of the sausages. It was then that the headline caught her eye: SEVEN SLAIN AT TALIESIN. And under it: Love Bungalow Murders. She set down the fork and began reading—the story was so horrific, so compelling and awful, she couldn’t help herself; it was like a novel, a romance, and here was the hero of the affair, Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, in half-profile, staring out nobly across the continent and the sea too. Her breakfast went cold. The coffee sat untouched. The waiter never so much as glanced at her.
She read through the article twice and then sat for a long while studying the photograph. Very slowly, as if she couldn’t control it, she began to shake her head from side to side even as the tremor crept up her spine one vertebra at a time, as if a series of individual fingertips were poking at her in succession.
The poor man, she was thinking. The poor, poor man.
1 Wrieto-San in the original.
2 Unidentified male; perhaps one of his acquaintances from earlier, happier days in Chicago society.
3 Call him Albert Bleutick for convenience’s sake, a man of median height, median coloring, with a medial swell of paunch and a personality that was neither dominant nor recessive, a companion of the second stripe, one who could be relied upon to pick up the tab at lunch and actively seek out tickets to the ballet, the symphony, the museum. His was the fate of all minor characters in a major life: to perform a function and exit, as colorless as the rain descending on the dreary gray streets on a day that might as well have rinsed itself down the drain for all anyone cared.
4 I knew her at Taliesin as a sour, thin, humorless woman, tubercular in that first year, busy, always busy with the work of the place, scrubbing, hanging out clothes, hoeing in the garden and splitting wood for the stove, the furnace and the seventeen fireplaces we kept going eternally for the poor heat of them in that cavernous edifice, but she was a girl once, and in love. Grant her that.
5 Wrieto-San in the original, and ff.
6 Georgei Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, 1866 (?) -1949. Philosopher, composer, shaman, hypnotist. Magnum opus: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. Espoused lifelong doctrine called “The Work,” a muddled philosophy of being with its own mythos and cosmology that attracted to him a ring of disciples whom he arbitrarily embraced and cast out of the fold. He was at Taliesin in 1938, I believe it was, a shambling ancient Armenian Turk or Gypsy of some sort with an accent so impenetrable he might as well have been talking through a gag. I remember seeing him off in the distance each morning, a bundle of animated rags conferring with Mrs. Wright while Wrieto-San fumed in the studio.
7 One of those curious overheated phrases of O’Flaherty-San, which we will let stand.
8 Zona Gale, author of popular appeasements such as Miss Lulu Bett, who was then at the height of her fame, and more marginally, her beauty. But she kept cats and had claws of her own. And, of course, like all novelists, she had unrealistic expectations.
9 Officially, the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, an oxymoronic designation, it seems to me.
10 Vlademar Hinzenberg. An architect. A Russian.
11 Wrieto-San was a great one for holidays—Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas—and if there was no holiday in sight he would invent one to suit him, the Fundament of June, Midsummer’s Eve, the Pillars of March, the stronger the whiff of paganism the better. He was an inveterate arranger too, forever fussing over his furniture and objets d’art, and he threw himself into holiday decoration with all the fierceness of his unflagging energy (an energy, unfortunately, that often manifested itself in a sort of superhuman volubility that made it difficult to be around him for more than an hour or two at a time).
12 “The Elf King.” And what could be more appropriate?
13 Maude Miriam Noel, 1869-1930. Southern belle, sculptress, dilettante. Wrieto-San’s second wife. I never met her personally, but Billy Weston described her to me in some detail. “She was trouble,” he said. And then he used one of those peculiarly apposite American expressions—such a trove, the English language—“She was,” and he paused a moment to stare off into the distance, as if his brain, the actual organ, were being radically compressed by the squeezebox of the memory, “real hell on wheels.”
14 Of course, O’Flaherty-San is flexing his imagination here, trying to see thing
15 Née Caruthers, 1870- ?. A friend of Miriam’s youth in Memphis. They remembered each other’s birthdays and corresponded frequently, but never more voluminously or passionately than in the first few years of Miriam’s marriage—at fifteen—to Emil Noel, scion of a distinguished Southern family, who took her off to Chicago where he became a decidedly inartistic functionary at Marshall Field’s.
16 La Noire idole, Étude sur la Morphinomanie, by Laurent Tailhade. Paris: Leon Vanier, 1907. A defense and celebration of morphine, written to counter the sensationalism of Maurice Talmeyr’s Les Possédés de la morphine, which chose to view the use of this medicinal drug in what Tailhade considered an erroneous and negative light. In Miriam’s defense, it should be said that during her days in Paris—roughly 1904-1914—the use of morphine was widespread, particularly in fashionable and artistic circles, and was considered, on the whole, no more remarkable in a young woman than smoking, wearing trousers or imbibing cocaine-infused beverages like the wildly popular Vin Mariani.
17 Actual name. No need really to comment on these absurd juxtapositions of function and fate, but I did once consult a dentist in New Haven by the name of Dr. Hertz.
18 From 1914 to 1923. Wrieto-San took her up after the death of his previous mistress and first moved her into Taliesin in 1915, though he was still married to his first wife, Catherine, who refused to grant him a divorce. As indicated above, the people of the community—simple types, holding fast to their rustic mores and easily manipulated by tub-thumping editorial writers and backwoods preachers—were scandalized, treating Wrieto-San as a pariah. This animus may well have precipitated Wrieto-San’s decision to take on the commission for the Imperial Hotel and move—with his mistress—to Japan, a far more compliant and civilized country.
19 Metaphorically speaking, that is. At this stage of his life, in late middle age, Wrieto-San was growing stocky, devolving into the Welsh farmer he was born to be. By my reckoning, his shoulders were no wider than average.
20 To say the least. Typically his acolytes were allowed no more than four hours sleep a night and they spent the remaining twenty in the Master’s service, putting themselves through a routine of hard physical labor, dance movements and spiritual and psychological exercises designed to awaken them from the death-in-life of the closed consciousness. Some would call it slave labor, but in the end it wasn’t much different from what Wrieto-San would expect from his apprentices, though we did sleep, on average, an hour or two longer. And we didn’t dance. Not if we didn’t want to.
21 The Packard? I know Wrieto-San had one of these automobiles in 1929, a touring car he took with him to Arizona, but I’m not certain of the provenance of this one. Perhaps it was the Cadillac in which he fled to Minnesota in 1926 to escape prosecution on Mann Act charges. In any case, Wrieto-San changed cars the way most men change socks.
22 Amanatto, made from adzuki (red beans). My personal favorite are chitose, sweet-bean dumplings covered with pink and white sugar representing the glow of sunrise and snow on Mount Fuji. Each year for Setsubun my mother would make tray after tray of them, even when we were living in Washington, and allow my brothers and me to gorge on as many as we could hold. Which was fewer than you might think—bean paste is surprisingly filling, especially when it’s been sweetened to perfection.
23 La Miniatura, constructed in a ravine in Pasadena, was especially problematic. As were the flat roofs of all four of these unique, Mayan-inflected concrete-block houses, architectural treasures all. Leakage was to be expected—it was the fault of the climate, Wrieto-San would insist, nine months of desiccating sun, three months of monsoon rains—but he did personally see to the flashing for Mrs. Alice Millard, chatelaine of La Miniatura.
24 While he may have been the world’s greatest architect, Wrieto-San lacked expertise when it came to electrical devices. Half the wiring at Taliesin was jury-rigged and we were forever watching a lightbulb sizzle in the socket or plugging in a lamp or radio to the sound of an explosive pop and the odor of scorched wires.
25 No surname available. No one seemed to recall anything about him, except that he was called Mel.
26 One wonders if Wrieto-San ever stopped to think what he was doing. To create the fiction of Olgivanna as his housekeeper and almost immediately impregnate her begs the question.
27 By apprentices.
28 Martha (Mamah) Borthwick Cheney, 1869-1914.
29 A considerably inflated figure, it seems to me. But then Wrieto-San was always over-valuing his collections—his Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) especially—in order to raise money against them as a sop to the vast armies of his creditors.
30 Three mistresses, three Taliesins. One can only imagine how Olgivanna must have felt with regard to the line of succession. Given her private education, certainly she must have been acquainted with Henry VIII.
31 I don’t know how far this homily would go in assuaging the fears of a young girl morbidly afraid of lightning, but I had it from a reliable source—Svetlana herself. And she was a perfectly well-adjusted (and quite fetching) girl in her teens when I knew her at Taliesin. Of course, she did run off at seventeen to elope with Wes Peters, incensing Wrieto-San.
32 True enough. Wrieto-San employed the same subterfuge with regard to Miriam’s role in the household when he moved her in ten years earlier, even going so far as to draw up a contract putting her wages at $60 a month, but it proved transparent. Within days, the papers were decrying the architect’s continued flaunting of convention, denouncing Taliesin as a “Sin Nest” and “Love Bungalow” and the like.
33 Jasper J. Jesperson, 3720 Figueroa, Los Angeles, California. Private Investigations of a Discreet Nature.
34 An indication that Wrieto-San was attempting to be discreet, if not deceptive. In recent years, he’d come to prefer the Congress, on Michigan Avenue (an undistinguished edifice, really, built in 1893 as an annex to Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Building across the street), perhaps because it was the place to be seen, its Pompeian Ballroom attracting the smart set as well as Chicago’s social elite. I never stayed there myself, even in later years when I could easily have afforded it—the only time I spent a night in Chicago during my apprenticeship was when Daisy Hartnett and I were able to get away on the pretext of her mother’s illness. The hotel we chose was inconspicuous, to say the least. And a whole lot cheaper than the Congress.
35 Miriam was noted for the originality of her dress.
36 Magnesium oxide. Remember magnesium oxide? The famous photograph of myself and three other apprentices leaning over Wrieto-San’s shoulder as he plied the tools of his trade was taken during the flashbulb era, of course, but I still have the photograph my father insisted I pose for in commemoration of my return to the United States some four years earlier. The picture shows an earnest, slim (I wish it were so now) young man in jacket and tie and formally lubricated hair who is about to experience a coughing fit as the cloud of magnesium dust engulfs him on a wayward gust off the San Francisco Bay. I believe I spat up white phlegm for a week.
37 This was a private ceremony, in November of 1923. The reporter’s confusion may allude to Miriam’s comments to the press in 1915, shortly after it was discovered that she had moved into Taliesin as Wrieto-San’s mistress. At that time she quite forcefully expressed her contempt for the institution of marriage (“Frank Wright and I care nothing for what the world may think. We are as capable of making laws for ourselves as were the dead men who made the laws by which they hoped to rule the generations after them”).
38 As will be seen below, the yellow press of the day came to refer to Wrieto-San a
39 Precise derivation of the nickname unknown. A Montenegrin endearment?
40 She’d allegedly been jailed for a brief period in Paris after attacking her ex-lover with a knife, and from the beginning she made it known to Wrieto-San that she was not to be trifled with. She kept a pistol. And she firmly believed that her scarab ring was invested with the power to reconcile her accounts in the supernatural sphere, almost in the way of the Voodooists of Haiti and New Orleans.
41 Vladimir Lazovich, a shipping agent living in Queens, New York. Olgivanna’s brother. Not to be confused with Vlademar, her former husband.
42 For Wrieto-San an uncharacteristic emotion.
43 Catherine “Kitty” Tobin Wright (1871-1959), Wrieto-San’s first wife. They married, against all sense and advice, when he was twenty-one and she just out of high school. The children—Lloyd, John, Catherine, David, Frances and Llewellyn—came in rapid succession, like plums dropping from a tree. By all accounts, Wrieto-San seemed bewildered by them. It is unlikely that he would have given much thought or consideration to Catherine’s pregnancies, beyond the obvious financial and architectural exigencies to which they gave rise.