Loving Frank (31 page)

“And we did it?”

“We must have. How else would they know about her?”

“Then why are book sales so bad? I paid Ralph Seymour good money to publish them, and I haven’t gotten a dime back.”

“Well, maybe the masses didn’t purchase
Morality of Woman
or
Love and Ethics.
But the magazine writers did. At least her ideas are getting exposure. It’s what we set out to do, and it’s happening.”

“I think that calls for some kind of toast.”

“I’d gladly celebrate if I weren’t so appalled by this essay.”

“You don’t need to agree with her on everything.”

“No. But I’m perplexed. Ellen came into my life when I was at the bottom of a well, and she threw a rope down to me. Ever since, all I’ve wanted to do is get her books into the hands of American women. This essay, though…it’s Ellen’s romantic eugenics in florid bloom. She paints a picture of women in a hundred years as fully realized personalities who want nothing more than to be breeder hens of a superior race. I’m almost embarrassed to send it out to anyone.”

Frank sighed. “But Ellen Key is not you. You are not Ellen Key. You are her translator. You can decide to take it or leave it, but you can’t censor her. I say, let the chips fall where they may.”

Mamah shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s ironic that Ellen has never been married or had children, yet she feels free to expound upon motherhood. I think that’s rather arrogant.”

“Bad trait, arrogance.” He wore a wry smile as he whittled at another pencil.

“Look at the fine time Ellen’s having being a famous intellectual. She dines with heads of state. Corresponds with some of the most famous people in the world. She mourns her bad luck in love because it kept her from having babies. But my goodness. She’s had a rather glorious career for herself—a career she wouldn’t have had if she’d been the kind of full-time mother she glorifies.”

“You sound almost angry at her.”

THAT NIGHT,
lying in bed, Mamah wondered how she had managed to turn a deaf ear to what Hedwig had told her about Ellen. She had heard it, then filed it away somewhere in her mind. It disturbed her to think that she’d done that.

Frank’s remark about her being merely Ellen’s translator had stirred Mamah, too. Had her own identity gotten all tangled up in Ellen’s? She was such a powerful force. Ellen Key had a mind like a honed steel ax. It would be hard to argue with her about the damage this article might do in the United States, just at a moment when factions in the Woman Movement were putting aside differences to unite for the vote. For years before she met Frank, Mamah had been a passionate suffrage supporter. She wondered what had happened to that young woman.

Back in her study, she closed the Swedish version of
The Misuse of Woman’s Strength.
Maybe she would drag her heels on translating it. Maybe she’d even tell Ellen no editor wanted it. She searched the bookshelves, looking for a place to put it, and ended up setting the booklet on its side—not quite put away.

Outside, the sun had burned away the gray clouds. Through the icicles glittering like wet crystals, the sky had turned blue as a robin’s egg. Mamah thought she saw a white shape move among the frozen grasses in the field. It was probably a hare, foraging for bark or twigs or buds on branches. Frank had said hares turned completely white in winter to conceal themselves from predators. But they had to come out for food.

Mamah took down her field glasses from the bookshelf, put on her boots and coat, and hurried out into the snow. Slipping, nearly skating, down the icy driveway, she stopped once to look back. Taliesin’s fringe of icicles glinted. Oh, it felt grand to be out in the air. When she went back to the house, she would bring Frank out to show him how his “shining brow” was shining.

She headed into the field, breaking the icy crust with each step, then sinking to her knees in snow. She walked head down, the field glasses swinging from her neck. When she looked up to get her bearings, her face met the sun. In that moment her pupils contracted from the blazing light. She could see only throbbing waves of white. No clear outline appeared as she looked back at the house. Nothing distinct anywhere, really. She couldn’t even see her feet.
You fool,
she thought, laughing out loud.
Knee-deep and snow-blind.

She closed her eyes and waited for it to pass.

CHAPTER
41

N
ear the end of April, spring pushed out through stiff branches and spiked up from the mud. Tiny green fists unfurled themselves. Mamah hoped against hope that spring wouldn’t suck in its fragrance and retreat.

Seed catalogs had arrived in February. When the few packets she’d ordered appeared in mid-March with the mail, she planted the seeds in coffee tins and arranged them along the south-facing windows in her study.

Whenever she and Frank got a moment together throughout February and March, they talked about planting. Frank hovered over his own catalogs of plum and apple tree varieties. “This Yellow Transparent here?” Frank said once. “We called it the ‘harvest apple’ when I was a kid, because it ripens during wheat-threshing time.” He was off then, recounting memories of the pies his aunts had made during harvest, and of the migrant threshers who ate them.

Planting fever was not new to Mamah. Even in the Berlin boardinghouse, without a square foot of her own dirt, she had entertained herself by imagining what she’d pick if she had but one choice. She’d settled on a Japanese peony she’d seen in a book, the kind with heart-stopping white flowers that had a fragrance straight from heaven.

Now the plant dreaming was on a colossal scale—thirty-one acres to think of, including an orchard and a vineyard. Then there was the terraced garden that rose to the hilltop, where Frank had encircled two majestic oaks with a low limestone wall, creating a sloping hill garden and the “tea circle.” Along with these, there were planting beds scattered all around the house.

Frank had consulted with his friend Jens Jensen about the orchard and vineyard. He trusted the list of apple trees and grape varieties Jensen suggested, and added his own favorites. But Mamah had her own authorities—Gertrude Jekyll, the English plantswoman, chief among them. Mamah knew Jensen’s prairie-style landscaping, even admired it. But grasses didn’t make her heart thump the way roses did. As more catalogs arrived, she became giddy reading about county-fair first-place winners.

“Aren’t these little striped carnations adorable?” she said in a moment of surrender. She pointed to a watercolor picture on the cover of a catalog.

“Freaks,” he said.

“But hollyhocks might look handsome standing against the stucco,” she ventured.

He gritted his teeth as if he’d backed into thorns. “I don’t like foundation plantings.”

She shifted in her seat and took another tack. “I know, but hollyhocks are architectural, really. Big plants give a garden
form,
like wonderful pieces of sculpture. Gertrude Jekyll uses them a lot.”

He didn’t respond. She knew what he wanted. Plants in the native vernacular. From the beginning he’d said that Taliesin should be all of a piece. That the woods, the fields, the orchard and garden and house should be one seamless, continuous cloth.

“It’s not that I just want sumac all over the place,” he said, “but—”

“But the detail expresses the whole. I know that. Don’t you think I understand after all this time?”

“There are design considerations.”

“Have I no taste? I once hired you, you know.”

He ran a hand through his hair.

“I think you’re just afraid to cede control,” she said.

He looked crestfallen. “I built this place for you, Mamah.”

“Then think of your client, my dear. She is a woman who has seen England in summer. I don’t understand why we can’t have flowers
and
prairie grasses.” Mamah got up and embraced him. “Does everything have to be exactly right? Can’t we play? Can’t I make a few mistakes while I’m figuring things out?”

He allowed a smile. “Nothing pink. And limit the foreigners, will you?”

“Reds and yellows would be gorgeous.”

“You’re the gardener,” he said, heading into the studio.

MAMAH THOUGHT ABOUT
the planting beds from every angle. She watched the changing light on the hill leading up to the tea circle. She pondered the catalog descriptions, struggling to hold in her mind at one time the flowers, foliage, and berries of various plants. Poring over Frank’s plans for the whole of Taliesin, she made her own diagrams of flower beds and seasons, trying to create progressive waves of color.

Overwhelmed, she ended up picking old favorites and some she didn’t know a thing about. She chose phlox Coquelicot—twelve of them—because its flower was the color of orange poppies; then she picked another three varieties as much for their names as for their colors, hoping Fraülein G. von Lassburg would bring out the best in General von Heutsze. She ordered twenty rugosa roses, twenty mock oranges, ten snowball viburnums with white ruffled flowers the size of plates. Multipes of flowering plants were added, mostly in hues of red and orange.

She thought she had ordered too much until she saw Frank’s orchard list. Two hundred and eighty-five apple trees in twelve varieties, not to mention twenty each of plum and pear trees, three hundred gooseberries, two hundred blackberries, and a hundred and seventy-five raspberries, plus two hundred currant and grape plants for the vineyard. Her eyebrows went up. “Did a drunken sailor with a taste for pies fill out this form?”

“We’re laying the foundation,” he said. “It means self-sufficiency.” There was impatience in his voice. “Anyway, Jensen gets these things cheap. They’re just little saplings, and if we don’t plant them now…”

He looked over her choices, then added twenty sumac trees to the list.

FRANK MENTIONED
one afternoon in the middle of May that the plants were due in a day or two. He’d hired a couple of trucks to bring the shipment over from the Spring Green train station when it arrived, and they would need extra hands to unload.

“There are two boys over at the Barton place,” Josiah offered.

“Do you know them?” she asked.

“Nice family,” Josiah said. “Boys’ll be in school till afternoon. But I’d get ’em over here now to start digging holes.”

“Will you arrange it?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Josiah went to make the phone call from the kitchen.

“Tell them I will come to pick up the boys tomorrow,” she whispered as he was calling.

“I can get them,” he said.

“Thank you, Josiah, but I’ll go.”

Mamah had observed the little farmstead every time she drove along County Road C. It was like almost every other country farmhouse in the area—a whitewashed clapboard house with a swatch of cut grass in front of it, a barn, a windbreak to the north, and fields of crops that ran right up to the yard. She remembered the first time she’d taken real notice of this one. Driving past, she had caught sight of a small girl balanced over the top rung of the white fence, dangling a string toward a cat below her. A few feet away, rabbit skins were stretched out on the fence, drying.

Mamah had told Josiah to make her identity clear to the mother who answered the phone. Miss Mamah Borthwick from over at the Wright place would be coming to pick up her sons if they could be spared for some planting work at Taliesin. Standing next to the telephone as he spoke, Mamah waited for a polite refusal.

“They’ll be ready for you at three o’clock,” Josiah said.

Mamah let out the breath trapped in her lungs. “Oh,” she said with some wonder. “Isn’t that grand?”

“GLAD TO MEET YOU.”
A stocky woman younger than Mamah answered the front door, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’m Dorothea Barton. Come on in.” She led Mamah into a tiny parlor, where she handed over two mason jars of blackberry preserves with bows around their necks. “I’ve been meaning to get over to your place to welcome you.”

Mamah stood in the tiny parlor, struck dumb by the woman’s friendliness.

“Did the flu get you folks this winter?” the woman asked.

The press got us,
Mamah wanted to say, but this woman was not like Mattie or Else or even Lizzie. “No, thank goodness.”

As Dorothea Barton went out into the yard and hallooed for her sons, Mamah glanced around the parlor. There were mismatched blue-patterned china dishes arranged on a rack above a sideboard. An ancient studio portrait of an old-time family. A battered organ with a fringed shawl thrown over it. A shiny black horsehair sofa. Above the organ, an embroidered hanging read,
DILIGENCE IS THE MOTHER OF GOOD LUCK
.

When Dorothea returned, she was followed by two gangly boys in their teens who announced themselves as Leo and Fred.

“Did you see my Emma when you came in?” The woman had a young girl by the hand. “Emma, tell Miz Borthwick how old you are.”

“Six.”

“You have a daughter about her age, don’t you?” Dorothea asked Mamah.

“I do.”
She’s read about Martha and John,
Mamah thought. “She will be here for the whole summer. I know she would love to meet you.”

Heading down the driveway of the farm, she saw that Dorothea Barton’s cutting garden was already sprouting flowers. Nearby, circle-patterned trellises braced luxurious grapevines. “Where did you get those supports?” she asked the boys.

“Pop makes ’em out of barrel hoops,” Leo said. “He can do a hundred things with a barrel.”

When she got home, she went looking for Frank. She called out to him, but he was nowhere nearby. She took off her coat and went back into her study. There she found her coffee tins and seedlings placed on the floor. For a moment she felt puzzled, and then she understood. Frank had taken them down from the window because of how they looked, she was sure of it. They cluttered the lines of the windows and had probably driven him mad for weeks.

It hurt her, almost like a slap on the hand, but she put the slight aside. It was warm enough now to harden off the seedlings. She gathered the cans onto a tray and carried them outside. She wouldn’t mention the barrel-hoop idea to Frank. He would think she had taken leave of her senses.

MAMAH CALLED THE
Barton boys when the truck with the plants arrived the next day. Their father, Samuel, drove them over and got out of the car to have a look. He was a tall, emaciated man with a bottlebrush mustache.

“Rotted,” he said as the boys unloaded the perennials first. The chrysanthemums, physostegia, and coreopsis were all dead. Of the sixty phlox plants she’d ordered, only fourteen had survived the trip. Fraülein von Lassburg and General von Heutsze were among the corpses. All twenty rosebushes were dried out and useless.

“I can’t help you with those,” he said, “but if we work quick, we can save the berries and apple trees. How many men have you got here?”

There were Josiah, Billy Weston and his son, the Barton boys, and eventually, there would be Frank, who had gone to Madison for building supplies. Mamah went into the house and brought out the drawing of the whole property, with its tiny Xs showing how the trees would form grids diagonally down the hills. She didn’t mention the grid’s inspiration, how the trees in the Arno Valley below Fiesole had been marked off into squares by cypress trees. She knew better than to mention the undulating crops of Umbria or how the Japanese so artfully terraced their crops.

Samuel walked down the slope with Mamah beside him. He stood midhill with his hands in his back pockets. “Doing some big farming, are you?” he said.

With the truck fully unloaded, Mamah and the men stood in a forest of saplings. She was relieved when Frank appeared. He seemed glad to have a neighbor giving directions on how to plant the trees. Would Frank have known to prune them before they went into the ground, the way Samuel Barton was instructing everyone? In his feverish dreams of self-sufficiency for Taliesin, Frank had bitten off more than he could chew. He had not anticipated the Herculean job now at hand, but he would never admit it. He changed clothes and joined the men in the field.

For three days they planted. Mamah asked for help from Lil, who cooked two pot roasts for the men when they came in from the fields, while Mamah set about planting those things that had survived. When Dorothea Barton arrived with her family the morning of the second day, she and her sons began unloading boxes crammed full of plants she had dug up from her garden. “Sam said you lost some of yours, so here’s a few to plug in. The daisies are from the Wilkins’ garden. They’re the next farm past us. Oh, she has a garden. I’ll take you over there when it gets blooming.” The women worked beside each other, talking about gardens and children as they dug in the plants.

“Your sons are such fine young men, Dorothea,” Mamah said.

The woman looked up from her work, beaming. “Thank you,” she said.

At the end of the last day of planting, Dorothea and her little family toured the house. They took off their shoes at the door and walked through the house as if it were a peculiar cathedral. Dorothea seemed puzzled by Frank’s arrangements of mosses and rocks, and she called the Ming vase he had filled with willow branches “sweet.”

Samuel remained closemouthed until he reached the bedroom window. “She’s a beaut, all right,” he said, staring out at the view.

Mamah thought he was talking about the fields they had just planted. The little trees, laid out like black cross-stitches on a rustic quilt, were already charming and full of promise. How extraordinary it would be in six or seven years to look down upon them and see clouds of blooms.