The Women Read online

  She might have let it conquer her—wreckage, everything wreckage, strewn from one end of the country to the other, as if they were living under an evil spell and condemned to act out their futility over and over again—but she didn’t. There had been a revolution, the worst had been done, and it hardened her.78 And hardened Frank too. Within the month the house was transformed, essential furnishings in place, the larder stocked, fresh-split oak accumulating, a pair of milk cows lowing in the barn and new faces appearing each day. Projects were coming in—a house for Frank’s cousin to be built in Oklahoma, a massive twenty-three-story skyscraper in New York and a grand luxury hotel in the Arizona desert that would cost as much as three-quarters of a million dollars—and he needed draftsmen, architects, carpenters, clerical help. By Thanksgiving, Taliesin was alive again, all of them—even Svetlana—working so furiously there was hardly a moment for reflection.

  They fell into a routine. While Frank spent his time in the studio or out amongst the men, giving orders, as exacting as the demiurge himself, all the rest was left to her, and that was a good thing, a vital thing, because it was work and work was what she’d done for Georgei and now she was doing it for Frank, for her husband. And herself. For herself too. And the children. And Taliesin, let it rise again. This was the time of seventeen-hour days. Up in the dark, to bed at nine in a numb, tumbling descent to the pillow. The smell of sawdust on the air, of linseed oil, paint. The strength coming back into her hands, her forearms, her wrists and shoulders. She scrubbed, plastered, painted, washed, kneaded, peeled and chopped. Ordered the supplies, oversaw the cook, drew up a rotating schedule of household chores for the draftsmen, prototypes of the apprentices to come, who had no choice but to pitch in lest the whole enterprise collapse around them. They might have worked in an office in Chicago or Milwaukee, might have lived with their parents or in an apartment with a whole world outside their door, might have taken their meals at a boardinghouse or cafeteria, but now they were here and it was one for all and all for one.

  Winter settled in. The lake froze and Frank insisted on taking time out for a skating party. And then it snowed and they all went tobogganing. There was hot cocoa. A wienie roast. Porridge in the mornings and great cauldrons of soups and stews, heavy with cabbage, beans, rice and potatoes because meat was scarce on a farm that hadn’t been farmed, six, seven, eight loaves of bread a day, cookies, cakes, hot cider and pot after pot of coffee, so much coffee Olgivanna began to think they were floating the foundation on it. Butter, cheese, eggs, flapjacks. Apples two years in the barrel. Cane syrup. Molasses. Sugar. They needed fuel for the body. They needed heat—above all, heat. Because for all its rare beauty, Taliesin was as frigid, drafty and ice-bound as a medieval mead hall. Innocent of central heating, reliant on individual fireplaces that half the time burned down to embers,79 its rooms open one onto the other and banks of single-pane windows wrapped round the entire structure, it was practical only as a dream made concrete and why, she kept wondering, couldn’t Frank and his ancestors have settled in the tropics? Bermuda or some such place. Florida. The Gulf Coast.

  One afternoon she was in the kitchen with the cook and one of the draftsmen—a boy of twenty-three who’d come up from Chicago for the chance to work with Frank Lloyd Wright, a good boy with a ready smile and a croaking octave-splitting voice Frank liked to imitate when he took on the persona of Eeyore the donkey for Pussy’s benefit. His name was Herbert Mohl. He had eyes the color of rainwater, hair so fair it was nearly translucent. He was peeling potatoes—had been peeling potatoes since he’d washed and dried the breakfast dishes—and the job got away from him, a dull job, a job no boy would choose or want. Every time she glanced up he was sitting there motionless, the peeler in one hand, an unscathed potato in the other. “Herbert,” she said finally, glancing to the two tubs of potatoes—a bellying white mound in the one, a dirt-brown mountain in the other—“you know we’re going to need those potatoes for tonight, and then you’re on the wood detail and cleanup after that.”

  He gave her a long look, the potato clutched like a grenade in his hand. The light was dim, the windows gray. “You know what? I don’t care. I just don’t care anymore.”

  She was at the counter, on her feet, kneading the dough for tomorrow’s bread. Her feet ached. Her shoulders ached. Her nose was running and all morning she’d been surreptitiously wiping it on the sleeve of her sweater. She wanted to say something soft, mollifying, she wanted to cajole, but she wasn’t very good at cajolery and she was in no mood for argument or even, at this point, conversation. “You’d better care,” she said, “if you want to eat.”

  He rose from the stool so swiftly it startled her. “I’m an architect, not a scullery maid,” he said, his face flushed. “I didn’t come here to peel potatoes and tend your precious fires and scrub pots and pans till my fingers go stiff. And what about pay? I’ve yet to see a single cent out of this place.” He was verging on insolence and insolence she wouldn’t tolerate. Mrs. Taggertz, busy at the stove, stiffened. Money was a sore point with her too, and what was this, the Bolshevik revolution all over again? “Didn’t you ever think I might have needs—we might have needs, all of us, George, Cy, Henry?”

  “Only just peel.”

  Predictably, he flung down the potato and the peeler with it. Then it was the apron and then he was at the door. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I didn’t sign on to be anybody’s slave. I’m going back to Chicago if I have to walk.”

  She looked to Mrs. Taggertz, but Mrs. Taggertz wouldn’t return her gaze. The woman had never been particularly forthcoming—she didn’t seem to have much to say to anyone, but then she hadn’t been hired for her ebullience but rather for her ability to stretch one pot of soup into two—and when she did make conversation it was almost always couched in the form of gossip critical of someone or something. She was of the neighborhood and the neighborhood didn’t approve of Frank Lloyd Wright. Or of Olgivanna either. Even if they were married now. “I cannot believe my ears,” Olgivanna said, just to hear her own voice. She was furious, seething. How could this boy dare to speak to her like that? “Did you hear? Did you hear what he said to me?”

  Only then, only because she was directly addressed, did Mrs. Taggertz look up. Her hands were busy—she was chopping onions with an easy effortless stroke, as if her arm worked on a hinge—and she paused to scrape the residue from the knife. “He never washes the dishes right, that one,” she said, scraping. “And the silverware,” she added, shaking her head. “Disgusting.”

  Olgivanna thought of going to Frank, but she couldn’t bring herself to bother him when he was working. It was up to her to manage affairs around the house, just as she’d done at Fontainebleau with Georgei, and she was determined to do it. Without thinking, she set the dough aside to rise and took up the potato peeler.

  For the next hour, she kept replaying the confrontation in her head, thinking of what she should have said, how she should have been firm and yet yielding at the same time. Frank had particularly liked Herbert—he was a precise and unerring draftsman and an accomplished flautist who’d enlivened their musical evenings—and she’d liked him too, and now they would be a man short when there was so much work to be done. It was a shame and she could only blame herself. She’d been in a mood, but that was no excuse—she was in charge here and she should have demonstrated more self-control, more reserve, dignity. Never let anyone see what you’re thinking, that was what her mother had told her. And her mother was as fierce and commanding as any woman on this earth. Finally, when she’d finished with the potatoes, she went looking for him.

  By then, it had begun to snow. She’d smelled the change on the air early that morning, a premonitory scent of moisture riding high overhead in the steadily unfolding clouds, and she felt it too as an expectant softness that seemed to envelop her as she threw feed to the chickens and loaded lengths of split oak into a wheelbarrow and hauled it across the yard to the house, her breath streaming before her. Now the snow was beading
down, swift and tightly wound, with a hiss you could hear the minute you opened the door. Herbert wasn’t in his room and the fire there had burned out. The bed was made, but his clothes, his suitcase and the flute were gone. She felt a pulse of alarm: Had he really meant it? Was he that head-strong? That foolish? She slipped into her coat and went out to the courtyard to find his tracks there, a draftsman’s unerring line heading off down the drive and into the gauzy curtain of the storm. Already, they were filling in.

  In her haste—she had to get him back before Frank found out, and that was all there was to it—she’d neglected hat and mittens both. She found a cotton scarf in the pocket of her coat and wrapped it round her head to protect her hair, which was wet already, wet the moment she darted out the door, and she knew she should have gone back for the mittens, but she was in too much of a hurry to bother. Twice she slipped and fell going down the drive, her bare hands stinging in the cold. The wind picked up and threw pellets of ice in her face. Herbert’s tracks grew fainter. No matter: she knew where he was going.

  It was three and a half miles to the station at Spring Green. In optimal conditions, with her long purposive stride, it would have taken her just over an hour to reach it, but the snow was already ankle-deep and slick beneath with a thin transparent layer of ice and she had to pick her way carefully. The road was deserted before her. The hills swept round and plunged to the river, the faded image of the bridge plumbing a line to the far shore. Nothing was moving, nothing animate, but for the birds exploding from the bristled crowns of the trees that rocked in the wind with a frictive moan like the keening of the dead. Halfway there her cough came up on her and she had to lean against a fencepost to catch her breath, the snow sifting down around her, granulating in the folds of her coat, whitening the ends of the scarf and the frozen hem of her dress. Her nose was tender where she kept wiping it with the back of her hand. Both hands had gone numb. She couldn’t feel her feet.

  Still, she pressed on, telling herself she was just out for a stroll, thinking of the girls—they were with the housekeeper, ostensibly entertaining themselves, and by now they would have begged to go out of doors to sled down the drive, and perhaps they would have come looking for her, for their mother, for permission and assurances, and begun to wonder where she was. (Has anyone seen Mama? Svet would ask and she’d poke desultorily through the rooms, the kitchen, the living room, the loggia, the bedrooms, but she wouldn’t dare burst in on Frank—that was verboten—and in that moment she’d shrug it off and pull on her boots and mittens and go out to the stall where the sleds were kept.) She held that picture in her mind as the snow climbed across the fields and the landscape lost its features and everything strove for a cold white uniformity. She wasn’t lost. There was no chance she could be lost because she knew this road as well as any road in the world and that stand of trees ahead would have marked the edge of the Perry property and soon she’d see their farmhouse and smell the smoke of their chimney and then she’d be past it and the buildings of Spring Green would begin to define themselves against the burden of the snow. She kept on, feeling light-headed, feverish—was she catching cold, was that it?—and when she coughed she brought up a sputum the color of tapioca.

  She found Herbert at the station, sitting huddled on a bench under the eaves of the depot. He was hugging his shoulders, the suitcase at his feet, the narrow leather tube of the flute case set atop it, gathering snow. She came up the street, trudging through the drifts, and kicked her way up the steps to him. “Herbert, what are you doing?” she demanded, impatient despite herself. “You’re not serious about this, are you?” She had a whole speech prepared about the essential contribution and integral value of each member of the Taliesin community and how much Mr. Wright depended on him and she too, she too depended on him, but the cough clawed at her throat and stole the air from her lungs.

  “The station’s closed,” he said, his voice a doleful drone against the wind. “There’s nobody here, no fire in the stove, nothing. I don’t know how they expect . . .” he trailed off. His eyes were liquid with emotion.

  “I have come here all this way,” she said, her own voice toneless and weak, drawn down the funnel of her cough. “In the snow,” she added redundantly, waving an arm to encompass the dead street, the buried rails, the soft shifting backdrop of the storm. She was thinking of Georgei in that last winter when he broke up the coterie at Fontainebleau, of the way he’d thrown them all over with an indifferent shrug and how it had hurt her more than anything in her life. Under him they’d experienced something collectively no one of them could have experienced alone, a bond that transcended the physical and the knowable, a reason for being and waking and worshipping. Without him, they had nothing. She knew that. She felt the loss of it even now. And when she looked down at the boy shivering there on the bench, she knew she would never let go of it again. “I have come here,” she repeated, and she was coughing into her fist, the refrigerated poison of the air scouring her lungs and the brittle pellets beating at her face, “to take you back.”

  There was Christmas at Taliesin that year, Frank as entranced with the season as the children, caroling and snowballing and tobogganing and even donning a false beard to impersonate Father Christmas, and then he packed up everything and everybody—including Herbert and Mrs. Taggertz and Billy Weston and his family80—and drove them out of winter and into the perennial summer of Chandler, Arizona, where the sun blasted the splintered rock and the agave plants sent up their centennial spires. “We have no choice,” he’d told her, “if we’re going to have money to eat on,” and the promise of San Marcos in the Desert, a hotel that would dwarf the Biltmore and bring in a commission of some $75,000 and maybe more, glowed on the horizon like a mirage, just beyond the windshield of the open Packard Frank piloted out front of their little caravan.81 At first they put up in a Phoenix hotel—more dislocation, more confusion, clothes in a suitcase and Svet and Pussy looking as dazed as the parched and delirious Spaniards who first laid eyes on the place—but that experiment ended almost as quickly as it began. The expense of housing and feeding the whole troupe would have bankrupted them in a week—she told Frank that, told him again and again—and so Frank, never at a loss, hit on the idea of building a working camp on the job site. Ocatillo Camp was the result, a small miracle of timber and canvas, replete with kitchen, living areas, studio and bedrooms and the grand piano Frank insisted on installing no matter where he was. Electricity was brought in. Telephone lines. Water. Navajo rugs brightened the place and kept the dirt down. The girls browned in the sun. Herbert Mohl went back to the drafting table and Frank kept his whole team working through the day and into the night on the plans and models for the hotel and the New York City skyscraper.

  They stayed through May, and then—because the heat was infernal, like an invisible wall you walked into every time you stepped out the door, and because the funding for the hotel hadn’t come through yet and because she was nagging Frank about Taliesin and the neglect it was falling into yet again—they decamped and drove back across the country to the verdant hills of Wisconsin. “Mama, it’s so green,” Pussy cried out, and it was, Taliesin, as green as life. There were the old smells, old faces, the animals and the fields and the daily reward of being alive to Frank’s creation. For his part, Frank kept working. Kept pushing. And the funding for both projects kept floating just out of reach, $19,000 added to their debt now as the cost of Ocatillo Camp, a place already vandalized, already tumbling to ruin, money run like water through their hands, but who could have guessed what was coming in October of that year?82 No one. Least of all Frank.

  The commissions evaporated. The leaves blazed and fell. No one was building anything. And here came the holidays again and the cold and the compulsion to live with less, to do without, to pinch and scrape and hoard even as Frank, mercurial as always, denied himself nothing and the debts mounted. The draftsmen drifted away, all but for Herbert, who stayed on—as did Billy Weston and a handful of the workmen—for th
e promise of sustenance alone. Christmas was narrow, New Year’s narrower yet.

  There came a day just after the New Year when Olgivanna was helping the housemaid with the wash, stringing wet clothing on a line in one of the back rooms (the girls’ things, always filthy, half a dozen of Frank’s shirts, his underwear and socks), feeling vaguely irritated because the housemaid claimed she had a touch of the flu and wasn’t feeling well if you please, ma’am, and there was so much to be done. The previous day’s thaw that took the temperatures up into the thirties had been nothing more than a tease—a high-pressure system had settled in overnight and when she woke that morning the thermometer in the courtyard had registered ten below zero. Which was part of the problem she was now having—the clothes had stiffened on the line because the fireplace wasn’t drawing properly and no matter how much wood she stacked up she got nothing but the palest feeble lick of flame. And Mrs. Dunleavy (rehired because there was no one else) was all but useless, shifting about as if her feet had been nailed to the floor, her eyes rheumy and her face the color and consistency of the ball of dough Olgivanna had set aside to rise in the kitchen.

  Exasperated, her fingers stiff and the breath hanging like a shroud at the tip of her nose—she might as well have been outside for all the good the fire did her—she dropped the garment in her hands, crossed the room and bent impatiently to the fireplace. She poked at the fire a moment without effect, then snatched up the tongs and began extracting the logs, one by one, laying them on the stone apron though they were half-burnt and smoking still. “It could be the flue, ma’am,” Mrs. Dunleavy opined, even as the room filled with smoke. Olgivanna squinted up the chimney. The flue was open, as far as she could determine, but she beat at it with the poker in any case, leaning deep into the aperture and running the iron rod as far up the chimney as she could, hoping to dislodge some of the soot and resin there. She tried to keep her eyes closed, working the poker by touch, running it round and round, beating at the stone till she could feel the blackened particles sifting down into her hair and settling on the back of her neck. Then the larger chunks began to fall, and more yet, soot everywhere and the room choked with smoke.