The Women Read online

  Any minute now, I kept telling myself, any minute, but then, in the midst of my mounting joy, my insecurities began to take hold. I had no idea what to expect. While I was confident in my education to this point—after a full course of study at Tokyo Imperial University, I came first to Harvard and then M.I.T. for advanced work because I wanted a modern outlook on architecture, a Western outlook, and I was willing to work all day and lucubrate till dawn to get it—I was coming to Taliesin on impulse. It was as simple as this: one afternoon the previous spring I’d been trudging down the hall of the architecture building with a ziggurat of books under one arm and my case of drafting tools in the other, feeling out of sorts and depressed (what the popular musicians call “blue,” the true hue of anomie and hopelessness, my inamorata having left me for a Caucasian who played trombone, that most phallic of instruments, my studies repetitive and insipid and as antiquated as the Ionic column and plinth on which they were founded) when I took a bleary, world-weary moment to stand before the notice board outside the dean’s office.

  An announcement caught my eye. It was exquisitely printed on creamy dense high-fiber paper and it announced the founding of the Taliesin Fellowship under the auspices of Frank Lloyd Wright at his home and studio in Wisconsin, tuition of $675 to include room and board and an association with the Master himself. I went directly back to my room and drafted a letter of application. Five days later Wrieto-San personally wired back to say that I was accepted and that he awaited the arrival of my check.

  And so here I was, at the moment of truth. At the crossroads, as it were, and could anyone blame me for being more than a little anxious? I felt like a freshman coming to campus for the first time, wondering where he was going to sleep, what he would eat, how his coevals would view him and whether he’d experience the grace of acceptance and success or sink into disgrace and failure. Unconsciously, I began to increase my speed, the wind seizing my hair, the scarf slapping at my shoulders like a wet towel ripped down the middle, and I can only think it was providence that kept the loping dogs and blundering cows and all the rest off the road and out of the way on that final stretch to Taliesin.

  The river ran on and the road with it. Five minutes passed, ten. I was impatient, angry with myself, anxious and queasy all at once—and where was it, where was this architectural marvel I knew only from the pages of a book, this miracle of rare device, the solid heaven where I’d be living for the next year and quite possibly more? Where? I was cursing aloud, the engine racing, the vegetation falling back along the sides of the road as if beaten with an invisible flail, and yet I saw nothing but more of the same. Fields and more fields, stands of corn, hills rising and dipping all the long way through whatever valley I was in, barns, eternal barns—and then, suddenly, there it was. I looked up and it materialized like one of the hidden temples of The Genji Monogatari, like a trompe l’oeil, the shape you can’t see until you’ve seen it. Or no, it didn’t appear so much as it unfolded itself from the hill before me and then closed up and unfolded and closed up again.

  Was I going too fast? Yes. Yes, I was. And in applying the brake I somehow neglected the clutch—and the wheel, which seemed to come to life all on its own—and my Bearcat gave an expiring yelp and skewed across the road in a tornado of dust and flying litter, where it stalled facing in the wrong direction.

  No matter. There was the house itself, an enormous rambling place spread wide and low across the hill before me, struck gold under the afternoon sun, a phoenix of a house, built in 1911 and burned three years later, built again and burned again, only to rise from the ashes in all its golden glory. I couldn’t help thinking of Schelling’s trope, great architecture existing like frozen music, like music in space, because this was it exactly, and this was no mere chamber piece, but a symphony with a hundred-voice chorus, the house of Wrieto-San, his home and his refuge. To which I was invited as apprentice to the Master. All right. I slapped the dust from my jacket, worked a comb through my hair, tried above all to get a grip. Then I started up the car and drove off in search of the entrance.

  It wasn’t as easy as all that. For one thing, in all this hodgepodge of roads and cart-paths I couldn’t determine which one led into the estate, and once I did find what I took to be the right road, wending through the muddy chasm of a hog farm, I was arrested by the proliferation of signs warning against trespass. These could hardly apply to me, I reasoned, and yet an innate uncertainty—shyness, if you will, or call it an inborn cultural reverence for the rules and norms of society—held me back. The automobile shivered in the mud. I jerked the gearshift to the neutral position and stared for a long moment at the nearest sign. Its meaning was quite plain—incontrovertible, in fact. NO, it read, TRESPASSING.

  It was just then that I became aware of a figure observing me from behind the slats of a wooden fence on my left periphery. A farmer, as I took it, in spattered overalls and besmeared boots. He was standing ankle-deep in the ordure of the hog yard—right in the heart of it—the very animals nosing around him and giving rise to one of the rawest and most unpleasant odors I’d ever encountered. I watched him watching me for a moment—he was grinning now, something sardonic and judgmental settling into his eyes—and then I raised my voice to be heard over the engine and the guttural vocalizations of the animals. “I wonder if you might—” I began, but he cut me off with a sharp stabbing laugh. “Oh, go on ahead,” he said, “—he don’t care for nothing like that. That’s just for tourists.” He gave me a long bemused look. “You ain’t a tourist, are ya?”

  I shook my head no and then, thanking him with an abbreviated bow, I found the lowest gear and started up the hill, which seemed, unfortunately, to grow ever steeper even as the limestone walls and terraces and broad-hipped roofs of the house drew closer. But there was gravel under the wheels now and the prodigious Bearcat seized it, the wheels churning and the engine screeching like a mythical beast beating its wings and belching fire. Up I went, up and up—till the gravel suddenly deepened into a kind of lithic sludge and the wheels vacillated and then grabbed with a vicious spewing of rock and I thought to apply the brake just as I crested the hill and nosed up to the bumper of the car parked there. I was lit up with excitement, trembling with the exertion, the tension, the glory of it all. So what if I’d mistakenly come up the back road, used only by the tractor and the dray horses? So what if I’d come within an ace of hurtling into the rear bumper of Wrieto-San’s Cord Phaeton, the swiftest and most majestic automobile manufactured anywhere on this earth? I was here. I was home.

  My first impressions? Of peace, of beauty abounding, of an old-world graciousness and elegance of line. And there was something more too: a deep-dwelling spiritual presence that seemed to emanate from the earth itself, as if this were a holy place, a shrine where the autochthonous tribes had gathered to worship in a time before Wrieto-San’s ancestors, the Lloyd Joneses, had come over from Wales, a time before Columbus, a time when Edo was cut off from the world. I felt as if I’d entered one of the temples of Kyoto—Nanzenji, or better yet, Kinkakuji, its gold leaf harboring the light. All my anxiety dissolved. I felt calm, instantly calm.

  It was four o’clock in the afternoon. The sun hung above the treetops like a charm on an invisible string. I cut the engine and all the birds in the world began to sing in unison. Almost immediately the exhaust dissipated and I became aware of the lightness and purity of the air. It was scented with clover, pine, the chlorophyll of new-mown grass and the faintest trace of woodsmoke—and food, a smell of cookery that reminded me I hadn’t eaten since that ill-fated hamburger sandwich. I took a moment to breathe in deeply, considered lighting a cigarette and then thought better of it. Taliesin awaited me.

  I was just stepping out of the car, pulling off my (sweat-soaked) gloves preparatory to unknotting the scarf, when a figure emerged from one of the garage stalls in the courtyard just beyond the coruscating hood of the Cord. It took me a moment—my eyesight was far superior at a narrower range, the range of the drafting tab
le, that is, than it was at a distance—before I realized, my pulse pounding all over again, that I was in the presence of the Master himself.

  I bowed. Deeply. As deeply as I’d ever bowed to anyone in my life, even my reverend grandfather and the regent of Tokyo Imperial University.

  He returned my bow with one of his own—abbreviated, a bow of the head and shoulders only, as befitted his position in respect to my own. At the same time he surprised me by offering a greeting in Japanese. “Konnichi wa,” he said, leveling his eyes on me.

  “Hajimemashite,” I replied, bowing a second time.

  Wrieto-San was then sixty-five, though he admitted to sixty-three and looked and acted like a man ten or even fifteen years younger. In his autobiography, which had been published to great acclaim that year, he claimed to be five feet eight inches tall, but he was considerably shorter than that (I stand five feet seven and over the course of the ensuing weeks had the opportunity on a number of occasions to compare height casually with him and I certainly must have had at least an inch on him, perhaps two). He was dressed like an aesthete heading to an art exhibition: beret, cape, high-collared shirt, woolen puttees and the Malacca cane he affected both for elegance and authority. His hair, a weave of thunderhead and cumulus, trailed over his collar.

  “Ogenki desu-ka?” he asked. (How are you?)

  “Genki desu,” I replied. “Anata wa?” ( I’m fine. And you?)

  “Watashi-mo genki desu.” (I’m fine too.)

  This seemed to have exhausted his Japanese, because he leaned in against the hood of the Cord, seeking the light as if to get a better perspective on me, and switched to English. “And you are?”

  I bowed again, as deeply as I could. “Sato Tadashi.”

  “Tadashi? I knew a Tadashi in Tokyo—Tadashi Ito, one of Baron Ōkura’s group.” He gave me an appraising look, taking in the sheen of my shoes, the crease of my trousers, my collar and tie. “Your name means ‘correct, ’ yes?”

  I bowed in acknowledgment.

  “And do you suit your name? Are you correct, Tadashi?”

  I told him I was—“at least at the drafting board”—and he let out a laugh. He was a great one for laughing, Wrieto-San, a repository of playfulness and merriment and a natural soothing charm that only underscored the magnetism of his genius. And, of course, he was famous for his acerbity too, his moods and his temper, especially if he felt he wasn’t getting the respect—adulation, worship even—he felt he deserved.

  “And proper too?”

  Another bow.

  He was grinning now, his whole face transformed. “Well, I tell you, Tadashi, I have to say this is one of the features I like best about your people,” he said, straightening up and dancing a little circle round me on the paving stones—he could never remain static for long, his enthusiasm inexhaustible, his energy volcanic. “The following of the norms and strictures. I can be like that too,” he said, and he gave a wink to preface the sequel, “but I hope you won’t be shocked, Sato-San, if I’m improper more than I am proper. Wouldn’t want to pin a man down, would you? Shackle him with convention?”

  I didn’t know where the conversation had sailed off to, but I understood that this was a form of banter and that the only answer necessary was a soft murmured, “No.”

  “But you’re the one from Harvard, via the Institute of Technology, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.”>

  “My observation”—he was forever making pronouncements, as I would come to learn, and he’d made this one before—“is that Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students and makes prunes of them.”

  His tone indicated that laughter was called for and so I laughed and told him that he was right. Knowing how deeply he’d been influenced by the architecture of my nation, by the simplicity and cleanness of line of our homes and temples, I bowed again and said, “I simply could not go back to Japan with the sort of classical and ornamental education I was getting at the university . . .”

  “So you came to me.”

  “I wanted a hands-on approach, organic architecture, the use of native materials and the design of buildings that complement rather than dominate nature, all of this, all you’ve pioneered, in the Robie house, the Darwin Martin, the, the Willits and—”

  His expression—and I mean no disrespect at the comparison—was like the drawing-down of a lapdog’s features when it’s rolled over and stroked. He looked gratified—I’d said the right thing, precisely the right thing—and he was inwardly complimenting himself on his choice of Sato-San as a pupil. “Good,” he said, holding up a hand to forestall me. “Excellent. But I warn you, I am no teacher and there will be no instruction here. The Fellowship, as I see it, will offer you an opportunity to work at my disposal, for my purposes, in all phases of supporting my enterprise as a working architect. You do understand that, don’t you?”

  I said that I did.

  “All right, fine. You’ll start in the kitchen. Mrs. Wright tells me we need an extra hand there.” A bell had begun to ring—it was, as I’d soon learn, a Chinese artifact he’d brought back with him from one of his far-eastern excursions and it tolled every day at four so that the Fellowship could gather outdoors in the tea circle for afternoon refreshment. He’d already turned and started off in the direction of the sound, when he swung back round on me. “And this car, Tadashi—is it yours?”

  “Yes, Wrieto-San.”

  We both looked to the Bearcat crouched there behind the Cord, its fenders flaring and canary hood aglow despite the layer of dust. Wrieto-San’s expression had become sober, judgmental, the sort of look he adopted for discussions of all pecuniary matters, which, sad to say, were at the very heart of his life. To think that a man of his stature—not to mention age, wisdom and genius—should have to scramble continually to make ends meet, struck me then as unconscionable, as it does now, all these years later. And yes, I’d heard the rumors—that he was broke, pitifully few commissions coming in as a result of his misadventures and the scandals that had dogged him through the course of the past twenty years, the Depression drying up the pool of potential clients, his work considered derrière-garde in the face of changing fashion, the Fellowship simply a way of milking money out of those gullible enough to think his aura could communicate anything bankable to them—but still I was shocked to discover how much of the man was involved in simply keeping things afloat. He was tightfisted, no other way to say it. Maybe even something of a confidence man. And what did they call him in Spring Green, the nearest town? Slow-Pay Frank.

  “Isn’t it a bit extravagant?” he wondered aloud. “That is, wouldn’t it have been wiser, all the way around, if you’d put your money into the Fellowship? This tuition—it can hardly cover room and board, let alone all the other benefits you’ll see here—and I’ve kept it artificially low in order to get things started, given the difficult times. But really, Tadashi, this is . . . excessive.”

  It wasn’t for me to point out the discrepancy here. Though I will say privately that the Cord must have cost many times what I’d paid—or rather my father had paid—for the Bearcat, which was, I admit, something of an indulgence. But then I liked fine things too—and I’d never before owned an automobile. What I said, however—with a bow—was that the car wasn’t what it appeared to be.

  “It’s a Stutz, isn’t it?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.

  “Hai, Wrieto-San. It is. But this is an old car, eight years old. Used. I bought it used. Yesterday. In Chicago.” I attempted a smile, though frankly my mood was in decline. “So that I could be here promptly to join the Fellowship and work under your guidance and direction.”

  He seemed to consider this a moment. “All right,” he said finally. “Fine. But don’t expect instruction from me. I am not a pedagogue, not by any means. Remember that.” The bell rang once more. Several small birds—swallows, swifts?—darted out from under the eaves and shot across the courtyard. Wrieto-San turned to go, but caught himself. He gave me another long look. “You do
cook,” he said, “don’t you?”

  In fact, I didn’t cook. Or I cooked in the way any bachelor in any society cooks: minimally. The boiled egg. Beefsteak flipped twice in the pan. Frankfurter on a bun. None of this mattered, however, because my kitchen apprenticeship would consist entirely in chopping cabbage, husking corn and peeling the potatoes the other apprentices had dug out of the manure-enriched earth. The cooks, in fact, were two women of the community, the sisters of one of the workmen Wrieto-San had hired to renovate the Hillside Home School (formerly a progressive boarding school run by Wrieto-San’s spinster aunts), which stood on the far southwestern verge of the Taliesin property and was meant to house a portion of the Fellowship, and they had their own view of the Master, a view considerably less awestruck than my own. In any case, on that first evening, as I stood there watching Wrieto-San’s squared-up shoulders recede in the distance while he strode briskly away, the cane in constant motion—jumping right and left, twirling in the air like a magician’s wand—I didn’t have time to reflect on my status. At that moment an absurdly tall and powerfully built young man appeared out of nowhere, flinging himself over the near parapet like an acrobat and striding up to me with his right hand outstretched. He was dressed in overalls, work boots, a very casual flannel shirt with rolled-up sleeves. “Hiya,” he said, “you must be the new arrival.”