Loving Frank (3 page)

CHAPTER
3

W
hen the house was empty, Mamah went to the bathroom to fill the tub. Sitting on its edge, she stared at the ceiling, furious with herself.
Why on earth did I invite Frank Wright to come over here?

It was perhaps six months since she and Ed had gone to the theater with Frank and Catherine. For a period after they’d built the house, they had socialized with the Wrights fairly often, perhaps once a month. Now a friendly distance had developed. Frank’s reputation had grown considerably since those early days when they’d consulted on the house. Not since then had she and Frank shared a private conversation.

During construction, with some building detail as a starting point, they had lost themselves time and again in deep discussion. Those six months of collaboration seemed enchanted to her now. Frank Lloyd Wright had ignited her mind like no other person she’d ever met. At first their conversations were about ideas. They talked about Ruskin, Thoreau, Emerson, Nietzsche. Mamah told him of her passion for Goethe. He spoke reverently of his years working for Louis Sullivan, the great architect he called “Leiber Meister,” dear master.

They began to see each other as fellow outsiders, making jokes about “Saints’ Rest,” the name Oak Park had earned for its church spires and absence of taverns. In the village, there was no question that people perceived Frank as an artist on the fringe. What fascinated him was that she saw herself as an outsider, too.

“I’m like the trunk of a cactus, I suppose,” she told him. “I take in a dose of culture and time with friends, then I retreat and go live on it for a while until I get thirsty again. It’s not good to live so much inside oneself. It’s a self-imposed exile, really. It makes you different.”

Their deep discussions were a stark contrast to her discourse with Edwin. It was when Mamah found herself saving up insights to tell Frank—thoughts she never would have shared with her husband—that she knew they’d grown too close.

By that time the two couples were good friends. When she understood how near to the edge she was walking, the house was nearly built. She had turned then toward Catherine to cultivate a closeness with her.

It was at the housewarming party that Mamah had invited Catherine to give a joint presentation on Goethe to the Nineteenth Century Woman’s Club. She understood now what she’d been doing. She had been using Catherine, quite unawares, as a buffer between herself and Frank.

Sinking into the bathwater, Mamah recalled one of her last meetings with him. The memory of it had been a private place she’d gone to again and again during the past couple of years. It was 1904; the house was nearly finished. She and Edwin and John were living in it by then. Frank was in the middle of building Unity Temple, far too busy to come by to settle the last few details of the house. Nevertheless, he had appeared one morning, plopped down some plans on the table, and said, “Let’s settle a few things.”

She had looked back at him innocently, though she’d been terrified that he might come forward with some declaration of his feelings.

“First of all, where on earth did you get a name like Mamah?”

She’d burst out laughing. “Strange, isn’t it? Well, my real name is Martha, but my grandmother started calling me Mamah when I was quite small. I think she made it up because it sounded French. She was French, you see, and descended from Philippe de Valois, Marquis de Villette—a decorated officer of the Royal Military Order of Saint Someone or Other.”

“Is that where your gift for languages comes from?”

“That’s where it started. She insisted we speak French in the house when she was visiting.” Mamah had leaped up then. “Would you like to see her in a ball gown? I just came across a photo in one of the boxes.” She went into the bedroom, where the movers had put their things, and carried a box out to the dining room table.

Frank had laughed out loud when he saw the portrait. A delicate Marie Villette Lameraux sat in front of a painted backdrop of Mount Olympus in some long-ago photographer’s studio, her girlish personage festooned with garlands from the swirling braids over her ears to the loopy ribbons draped between rosettes on her gown. She stared grimly at the camera.

Frank was grinning when he stood up to peer into the box. “What else is in there?”

“Just some of my old things. Papers…”

He sat down again and looked at her. “Tell me everything,” he said.

Tell me everything.
He might as well have said, “Take off your dress.” She had pulled one thing after another out of the box. She’d shown him her master’s-degree thesis and her graduation photograph. She’d talked of her years in Port Huron, teaching English and French at the high school with her college friend Mattie. She’d shown him photos of her family in front of their house on Oak Park Avenue.

“This must be you.”

“Uh-huh. This is my sister Jessie. She was the oldest.” Mamah pointed to the smiling sixteen-year-old and felt the familiar sad squeeze in her chest. “And Lizzie. Well, she looks just the same, doesn’t she? She’s the middle girl.”

Frank went back to the black-haired girl who struck such a confident pose, one hand holding a croquet mallet, a leg crossed jauntily in front of the other. “How old are you here?”

“Twelve.”

“Such pluck for a girl so young.”

“Oh, I was at just the right age then, I think. Smarter than I ever was before or since. There were no grays. I worshipped my father. I loved my dog. I adored reading.”

Mamah stared at the family picture. The sight of her and her sisters wearing middy blouses jogged another memory. “We were wild children, really. You see, my father was as an amateur naturalist. That was his great love, even more than the railroad. In summer he would take us down to a dry stream near Kankakee to hunt for fossils. It was an area where there had been a shallow sea in prehistoric times. He taught us to look very closely, and my eyes—at least my near eyesight—became quite acute. Nothing made me happier than crawling around the streambed for hours on end, looking for tiny patterns of shells in the rocks. My father always brought along a hammer. And when I cracked open a rock that looked promising—when I actually found imprints left by creatures that lived there five hundred million years ago—well, it was like opening up a whole world and falling right into it.” Mamah laughed. “It worried my mother to death.”

Frank looked surprised. “Why?”

“Because she preferred finding God in the second pew of Grace Episcopal Church. It unnerved her to see her daughters smashing rocks with hammers. She was wary of trilobites and Darwin and my father’s talk of the ‘human animal.’ And she thought I was far too…dreamy, I guess, or suggestible. I remember when my father brought home a telescope around this time. It was a good one, and he was excited to show us how it worked. That night we all went outside, and Jessie and Lizzie got to look through it first. They were awestruck by how many stars they could see with it. But after my mother had a good long look through it, I heard her say to my father, ‘Don’t show Mamah. It will be overwhelming for her.’”

Frank stared at her thoughtfully.

“It wasn’t too long after that that my mother took me in hand. My rock-smashing days ended, and dance lessons began. But by that point I was a bit of an odd one, not really interested in what most other girls cared about. I became something of an introvert, a bookworm, I guess you’d say.”

Mamah felt giddy at Frank’s attention, and a little embarrassed for revealing so much about herself. Yet she continued pulling things out of the box. “Another of my mother’s edification projects,” she explained, showing him the little German readers she had started with when she first learned the language. And then she showed Frank her birth certificate.

He held it up to the light. “June nineteenth, 1869,” he read. “Interesting. I was born June eighth of the same year.”

At any other moment, the remark might not have seemed unusual, but that afternoon, as they sat at the dining room table in the new house they had planned together, the coincidence struck Mamah as preordained. She wasn’t a superstitious person or particularly religious, but it seemed a kind of proof that they were meant to know each other, that fate had spat them out into the world at the same time, in nearly the same place, by design.

He looked at her graduation photo and spoke with sadness in his voice. “I wonder what my life would have been like if I had run into this young woman twenty years ago. To find someone so…” He paused. “I was a boy when I married Catherine—just twenty-one. She was only eighteen. The marriage never should have been permitted, really. Now…” He looked away, sighed heavily.

When he turned his face back, it was etched with tenderness. He took her hand. “You are the loveliest woman I have ever known,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her cheek.

She let his mouth stay on her skin for a heartbeat before pulling away.

HE CAME BY FOR
three consecutive days after that. To show Mamah other garages he’d built—that was the flimsy pretext. Neither Lizzie nor Edwin seemed suspicious.

The first morning, a brilliantly clear day, he drove her out to the far north prairie. They climbed out of the car and waded into the high grasses. Frank snapped the wheatlike head off a stem. “I wasn’t a rock smasher,” he told her.

“What were you, then?”

“Oh, something close. When I was a boy, I worked summers on my uncle’s farm in Wisconsin. At the end of the day, if I wasn’t exhausted—because he worked me hard—I went out into the hills and explored. I’d pull things apart to see how they were put together—flowers, plants like this…”

“And you fell into them?”

He smiled. “I did. Flower blossoms first, of course, because they’re so seductive. But then I saw how the stalk inevitably led to the leaf and bloom. It didn’t matter what plant I looked at. The structure was always sound, and the design essentials were all there: proportion, scale, unity of idea. Mind you, I was just a boy pulling things apart at that point.”

“Did you always know you wanted to be an architect?”

“Absolutely. For as long as I can remember. The idea of building shelters that let you feel you are living out in the open—that came later. But the instinct—the feeling for it—was seeded in me out there on the hillside. So, when I went to the university to study, I was excited because I had all these ideas about organic architecture based on how nature works out its building projects. But nobody wanted to talk about architecture that way. It was all about Palladian windows or Corinthian columns. So I left school.”

“That’s when you came to Chicago.”

“Yup. Apprenticed myself to Silsbee at nineteen, and moved on to Sullivan’s office a year later.”

A strong wind was blowing, pushing the grasses and wildflowers eastward.

“You landed in good hands.”

“Didn’t I tell you some of this when we worked on the house?”

“Yes, but not all of it.”

“Well, Sullivan was a marvelous teacher, and I was the pencil in his hand. He was continually talking about making
American
buildings. By the time I left him to start my own practice, I was bent on doing something new—making houses that speak of this prairie land rather than some French duke’s notion of what a house should look like.”

Mamah pulled wind-whipped strands of hair away from her mouth. “Was it always houses with you?”

“I couldn’t think of anything more noble than making a beautiful home. Still can’t.”

He gestured out toward the horizon, where a clear sky bordered prairie grasses as far as the eye could see. “Eventually, I fell under the spell of that line out there. It was so simple: a huge block of blue on top of a block of gold prairie, and the quiet line between heaven and earth stretching endlessly. It felt like freedom itself to look at the horizon. I had been drunk on forms since I was a boy, and here was this simple line that expressed so much about this land.”

Mamah watched his hands. Whenever he talked about architecture, his hands spoke their own language, moving gracefully as he formed right angles with thumb and forefinger, or mimicked planes with the flat of his palm.

“Of course, the horizon isn’t a perfectly straight line, but I wasn’t out to imitate it, anyway. I wanted to abstract it in a way that expressed the essence of it. When I began stacking one horizontal plane on top of another—parallel to the prairie, as I did in your house—the homes I designed began to look and feel grounded, like they belonged in this place.” Frank glanced quickly at her. “Am I boring you?”

“Not at all. In fact, you reminded me just then of when I was a small child. We were living in Iowa, and there was still prairie all around in those days,” Mamah said. “My father would put me on his shoulders so I could get the big view, and he’d talk about the wildflowers and grasses and clouds. He had a name for the bottom of the sky—‘the hem of heaven.’”

Frank smiled. “I like that.” He fell silent for a while.

“You were talking about organic architecture,” she said.

“It’s the only kind of architecture that makes sense to me. It’s all I want to do now.”