Loving Frank (27 page)

CHAPTER
37

October 28, 1911

F
rank presented me with bad news last night. He showed me an article about us that ran in the
Chicago Examiner
in early September. It was lurid—“love nest” and Catherine “left in the lurch” and all that. That no other newspapers jumped on board to make it a full-blown scandal is miraculous, I guess. In this case, I don’t begrudge Frank for keeping the whole thing from me until now. It’s not so awful to receive one’s bad news late, when the time for the other shoe to drop is well past. Lizzie, if she knew of it, made no mention to me.

On we go. Wasmuth has finally sent the monograph to Frank’s Chicago office. It has only sold a few copies in the U.S., but Frank is relieved and optimistic. Taliesin marks our new beginning. The monograph marks a new start for Frank’s career. No time to toast milestones. Too busy.

It weighs heavily on me daily that I have written but one letter to Ellen since I came to Taliesin. That I have been too burdened with the house to even think of writing seems a poor excuse. Thank goodness I have good news to deliver to her now—
Love and Ethics
is nearly published. Ellen doesn’t understand how provincial people are here in the States. She doesn’t fully comprehend why Frank had to put up the money for Ralph Seymour to print
Love and Ethics
and
The Morality of Woman.
I have tried to explain kindly that no other publisher would touch either of them. I am reluctant to tell her how badly I was treated at Putnam’s last summer when I stopped over in New York. They wanted no part of my proposal to publish her “personal freedom” essays. Their excuse was that their London office does all of her English translating. Obviously, she hasn’t told them I will translate for the American audience. In truth, though, I could smell something else in their lack of interest—fear. Too controversial.

Last week in the mail I received a disturbing letter from a man in New York named Huebsch who insists Ellen Key gave
him
exclusive rights to publish
Love and Ethics
in America. How very strange. Who knew that the translating business was as low-down as bootlegging? One makes so little money from it, it seems hardly worth the effort to steal.

Frank has begun building a dam to create a source of power here on the property. He says we will also have a pond for waterfowl. Taliesin is taking shape. Soon I shall have my own study!

Frank rose at dawn that morning, as he always did. He went outside to bring in wood while the sky was still a pink ceiling over the pale horizon. The furnace was not functioning yet—some parts of the behemoth were still missing—and Mamah didn’t think Frank cared a whit. He loved getting the stove and fireplaces roaring. She stayed in bed until she felt guilty, then stuck a foot out to test the air. Freezing. In a little while he would bring her the socks and dress and wool underwear she’d set out the night before. For the past week, he had been warming her clothes by the fire. When he brought them in to her, she would leap up, dance around the cold floor as she dressed, then go put the percolator on the stove.

Around eight-thirty, as he departed for the train to the city, she watched him move down the road. When his car passed a ditch full of cattails, it startled a flock of sandhill cranes. They flew up crying, straightened their long necks and beaks into perfect arrows, then turned southward, along with Frank.

Intent on settling in completely while Frank was gone, Mamah went to the shed to bring her remaining belongings into the house. She took a candle into the dark little building, pushing the door wide to get what daylight she could. Mamah moaned when the candlelight revealed the chaos inside. Shreds of paper and fabric lay around the chewed-up boxes where animals had been devouring their contents.

She sank to her knees to go through what was left of a box of old photographs. Raccoons, judging by the scat on the floor, had chewed the corners off of the pictures. She could save them, she thought, by trimming and reframing them, but as she sorted through the contents, her heart sank. She found a twenty-year-old family portrait shredded beyond repair, the legs of her parents and sisters chewed off.

Mamah felt ill as she carried the remains of her possessions into the house. She didn’t care so much for her clothes, but she ached over the loss of the portrait. And she was terrified to open the box with the half-finished translations in it.

Ten months had elapsed since Frank had appeared in Berlin, so full of hope and plans for their future in Wisconsin. At the time she had pictured herself as happy as a queen, translating at her own desk in a room with a vast view of the hills—an image she might have captioned
THE VOICE FOR ELLEN KEY IN AMERICA, AT WORK
. Now, when she opened the box containing the manuscripts, she was elated simply to find that they had not been eaten.

THE CLOSE CALL
shook Mamah. She resolved to return to translating at once, and sat down to write Ellen Key the letter she’d already composed in her head. She promised to send some essays to
The American
magazine, where they could be read by the general public, and she included the strange Huebsch letter. At the end Mamah assured Ellen she was back to work again.

She was just folding up the letter when one of the workmen knocked at the end of the hallway to get her attention. “Mrs. Borthwick?” someone called out. The men had begun to call her that name, at her own request, but it still sounded strange to her.

“Josiah’s come back today,” It was Billy’s voice. “Do you want to talk with him, or should I?”

“I will,” Mamah said. “Tell him to meet me in the living room.”

Josiah was a young carpenter’s apprentice who had revealed, during his brief employment with them, a considerable talent and a weakness for drink. In August and September, he had failed to show up on the occasional Monday. But by the end of October, he was missing two in five workdays, yesterday being the latest.

Josiah was small and wiry, a handsome boy with white-blond hair and a shy manner. He held his hat in his hands, his head bent as his contrite gray eyes peered up at her under the bushy blond eyebrows.

“We missed you sorely yesterday, Josiah.”

“I’m sorry about that, ma’am,” he said. “I was awful sick. Musta laid into something spoilt.”

Mamah studied the young man’s red face. Beneath one eye, the skin was swollen and yellow-green—suggestive of another barroom brawl. She hated the prospect of Frank having to fire him, if it came to that.

“Well, Josiah, the truth is, we need you desperately here. You’re one of the best carpenter’s apprentices Mr. Wright has had the pleasure of working with.”

The young man hung his head. “I’ll do better.”

“I know you will. I’m sure of it.”

The exchange left Mamah feeling enervated. It occurred to her that if she were to keep Ellen’s faith in her, she would have to find a way to separate from the day-to-day decisions and chores at Taliesin. The crews had shrunk enough for Lil to handle the food preparation by herself. It wouldn’t be premature to withdraw a bit now.

Taliesin had come a long way since Mamah had arrived that first August day. There were windows in—large clear panes, with no stained glass because there was no need to block out the views. There was plaster on the walls. Rough-cut oak beams thrust out from interior walls of stacked limestone.

How different from the house on East Avenue,
she thought. In Oak Park, the kind of building Frank had put up, despite being called a “prairie house,” turned inward toward the hearth and family life and turned its back on the street, because there was no real prairie beyond the door, only other houses.

Here, Taliesin opened its arms to what was outside—the sun and sky and green hills and black earth. Far more than the house on East Avenue, this house promised good times. It was truly for her, with its terraces and courtyard and gardens so like the Italian villas she had loved. Yet it wasn’t an Italian villa. It had elements of the prairie house but it was not one. Taliesin was original, unlike anything else she had ever been in—a truly organic house that was
of
the hill.

Most astounding to Mamah was the space within; it was a dimension unto itself. What could be more expressive of the American ideal than a home where a person could feel sheltered and free at the same time? She loved sitting near the fireplace and looking out through the spacious living room to the fields and sky beyond. It was as if there were no walls to limit her view or thoughts or spirit as they expanded out and out. This was the “democratic architecture” Frank had been straining to achieve since she’d known him. Often she had heard him say that the reality of a building is the space within. And what you put into that space will affect how you live in it and what you become. Here at Taliesin he didn’t want to clutter the place with stuff that did not ennoble them. She felt the same.

Mamah could picture Frank when he came to this hill with the idea of Taliesin brewing in his mind. Unrestrained by a suburban lot, he was free here to scoop up the sun and breezes and views. She could see him standing with his nose in the air, sniffing like a bird dog, taking in the place the way he often did when an idea began to form in his mind. Pretty soon the squares and rectangles, the circles and triangles, would be arranging and rearranging themselves in his mind. This could go on for weeks before pencil touched paper. When it did, he might sketch furiously for only an hour before a brilliant design appeared. How often she had heard him say with a bit of bravado, “I shook it out of my sleeve,” as if it were the easiest thing, when in reality the design had been stewing for weeks inside his head. Other times he would take out his compass and T square and play on paper for long hours, designing and revising an idea, just as he’d done as a boy with his Froebel blocks.

She could understand his creative process only to a point. “It’s a mystery,” he’d once said, “even to me.” Proof of that was the boyish joy he took in one of his buildings when it was finished. He seemed as delighted as a total stranger might be coming upon it for the first time.

There was no question that the men who had worked on Taliesin were immensely proud of it. To the man, they were devoted to Frank, probably because he would never ask them to do something he himself would not do. He honored what they knew and who they were, and they returned the sentiment. It was always “Mr. Wright,” never “Frank.” But they weren’t afraid to complain about the lack of working drawings or how he kept changing plans on the spot. They weren’t so respectful that they didn’t ask him to leave when he hovered around them as they worked. Any skeptics among them had been won over as they beheld the strange beauty of Taliesin, the “organic” house they had shaped with their own hands out of Wisconsin rock, sand, and timber.

By November the living room had taken on the feel of a camp lodge. Most nights, away from their families, the workmen gathered around the main fireplace, still wearing their coats and caps to keep warm. A shy fellow who assisted the Norwegian stonemason always brought his pennywhistle to play.

One evening Mamah set up Frank’s camera in the living room and had the men pose. It was hard to get them to sit still. They kept up their banter, laughing and teasing the young man who had recently married, saying he would look fat in the picture. “He may be pinin’ for the new missus,” someone said, “but it don’t put him off his feed none.” Their jokes were a measure of how relaxed the men had become in her presence. Yet they were respectful, even protective of her. If one of them launched into an off-color story within her earshot, he was quickly cut off.

When she peered through the camera, she regretted what the shutter couldn’t capture: the accents of Ireland and Norway and backwoods Wisconsin. The sweet, high longing of the flute. The smell of tobacco on the men, and sweat muffled under layers of wool. But the camera would see their smoking pipes and calloused hands. It would catch the twinkling eyes and puckish grins on their faces. Mamah knew then what she wanted to give Frank for Christmas. The men’s portrait would be one of a whole series of pictures for a photo album that would tell the story of Taliesin.

There wasn’t much time; snow was coming on. She made a mental list of what she wanted: long views from every direction, then close views of Frank’s studio, the bunk room, bedrooms, and living room. To capture the expanse of the living room, she would take three photos and splice them together in a triptych, like a Japanese screen. He would love that. She would photograph the simple oak tables and chairs and beds Frank had commissioned. And, of course, “Flower in the Crannied Wall,” looming like a guardian angel at the gate.

THE SECOND WEEK
of November, Frank’s sister Jennie called to say that a letter from Ellen Key had been delivered to her house. Mamah ran up the hill to Tan-Y-Deri, embraced Jennie, then hurried back to her own house to read the letter. When she opened it, she found that it was long and sprawling, like Ellen’s essays.