The Women Read online

  I attempted a bow, but the hand thrust itself at my own for the inevitable handshake, the half-amicable, half-aggressive and thoroughly unsanitary ritual greeting by which the men of this country test and judge one another. His hand enveloped mine—a rough hand, callused and work-hardened—and I tried to exert an equal pressure as we held to each other, sending my message through the flesh as he was sending his. His message was that he held no prejudices though he was nine inches taller than I and outweighed me by a good seventy-five pounds and had been raised in a place where a Japanese face was as rare as an Eskimo’s or a Bantu’s, and my message was that I was the equal of anyone and prepared for anything the Master might require of me—including kitchen duty.

  “Wes Peters,” he said, giving one last crushing squeeze (which I resisted with my own not insignificant pressure), before dropping my hand by way of completing the ceremony. “And you are Sato, right?”

  I bowed in acknowledgment, but this was an abbreviated bow, a bow reserved for equals. “Call me Tadashi,” I said.

  “Right,” he said, “Tadashi. Glad to meet you. And welcome.”

  “You’re one of the apprentices, I presume?”

  “Yes,” he said, and he was grinning now. “Our ranks are growing by the day. Mr. Wright says there’ll be thirty of us eventually. A whole squad. Including women. Five of them. From Vassar.”

  I didn’t know what to say to this—was thirty a large number? Or small? How much work could there be? I’d envisioned myself laboring side by side with Wrieto-San on drawings of significance, plans for great edifices like Unity Temple, the Fukuhara house or the Larkin Administration Building, my pencil under command of his. And women. I hadn’t expected women, not in an architectural enterprise. Distracted, I murmured, “Good. That sounds good.” Or perhaps I said, “Capital.”

  I’d been drawing since childhood, and where my fellow students at the Yasinori Academy might have sketched biplanes or automobiles, I created a private world for myself, doing perspective drawings of invented cities and then peopling them with fully fleshed figures striding down spacious boulevards on their way to the country houses I created for them, replete with sketches, floor plans and elevations. (Floor plans held a special fascination for me because I could so easily manipulate them to the greater good and insurmountable happiness of these blithely striding people for whom I’d devise names and occupations and emotional histories, pulling a wall back here for the billiard room or a sweets room there or a boy’s bedroom with a three-tiered bunk bed, ten-gallon hats and mounted bison heads on the walls and a private chute to the street below.) It seemed I always had a pencil in my hand, doodling, sketching, shading and coloring. I’d sometimes sit for hours dreaming over a sheet of paper till I saw things there no one else could see, compass, protractor and straight edge guiding me, my knees knocking beneath the table in sheer excitement, my whole being groping for coherence. It was incantatory, a form of magic, an electric current running from brain to hand to pencil till the page came to life.

  “But listen,” Wes was saying, his eyes jumping from mine to the Bearcat and back again, “I think we’re going to have to miss the tea circle today because we need groceries, I mean, we really need groceries, and I was just wondering if you wouldn’t mind . . .” he trailed off. He gave the car a significant look.

  It took me a moment—I can be a slow study at times, particularly when I’m fatigued, and I was no more than ten minutes out of the car, my bags still in the rumble seat, impressions washing over me like a tsunami—before I understood. “Oh, yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  “If you don’t mind,” he repeated in a meliorating tone, the tone of someone who’d got what he wanted, and he was already ambling toward the car with his great scissoring strides even as I fell in beside him. “It’s only four miles.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, swinging open the door on the driver’s side and peering down the hellish incline to the twisting road and the pig farm in the distance as he squeezed in beside me, “I don’t mind. No, no, not at all.”

  The woman at the grocery gave me—gave us—the sort of look the farmwife had impressed on me earlier, the clamped lips and burning eyes, no hint of sympathy or even common humanity, as Wes called for catsup, coffee, tea, flour, sugar, massive sacks of dried beans and rice and all the other necessaries the farm and vegetable gardens at Taliesin were unable to provide. (This look, incidentally, was one I would become inured to in the coming months. It had something to do with my racial difference, of course, but it was leveled almost equally on Wes and Herbert Mohl and just about anyone else associated with Taliesin, and was chiefly due to Wrieto-San’s attitude toward paying on account and the reservoir of bad feeling in the immediate environs over his past flings and flirtations and what the deeply conservative local populace considered the immoral way in which he conducted himself. Publicly. Here in the heartland. And he the son and nephew of preachers.) Once Wes had put his signature to the account—the woman livid, overheated, the tendons standing out in her neck, and her eyes flaying the very skin from our bones—we climbed into the Bearcat, our arms laden, and made our way back to Taliesin.

  And then I was in the kitchen, peeling onions.

  The chef de cuisine (Miss Emma Larson, forty-five years old, vigorous and plump, her graying hair bobbed and swept forward in a way that might have been fashionable on a mannequin in a department store window a decade earlier) bent over a blackened cauldron that was vigorously rattling atop the woodstove while her sister Mabel beat eggs with a whisk, and what must have been several pounds of cured meat made the journey from fry pan to platter. After the onions I peeled potatoes, and after the potatoes I peeled carrots. After that I washed dishes, hundreds, thousands of them, for weeks on end. What did I learn from the experience? That Wrieto-San (or Mr. Wright, as everyone, even his enemies among the farmwives and grocers, invariably called him) liked his food plain. He liked whitefish, calf’s liver aux oignons, stewed vegetables, good honest fried potatoes and berries ripe from the bush and swimming in the cream he was denied as a boy. And I learned that Taliesin was a true and democratic communal undertaking, save for the god in his machine who presided over it all in his freewheeling and unabashedly despotic way, and I saw too that a practicing architect was like the general of an army, like the general of generals, and that a whole host of amenities, civilities and mores had to be sacrificed along the way to the concrete realization of an inchoate design.

  He ran our lives, that was the long and short of it. Daddy Frank. How many times had I heard one apprentice or another call him that behind his back? Daddy Frank, paterfamilias of Taliesin. He stirred the pot continually, interfering in our personal affairs, our amours and disputes and loyalties, even as he squelched our initiative and individualism as fiercely as he’d asserted his own when he was apprentice to Louis Sullivan a generation earlier. Truly, I don’t think I’ll ever forgive him for coming between me and Daisy Hartnett—or for the loan he inveigled from my father (and, of course, failed to repay).

  But I’m not complaining—that’s not the purpose of this exercise. Not at all. And I was not of that subset of snickerers and wiseacres who acted as if the Fellowship were some sort of extended summer camp and Wrieto-San an archaic figure out of the dim past, “the greatest living architect of the nineteenth century,” as one wag had it. I stayed at Taliesin for nine years, longer than practically any apprentice, if you exclude Herbert Mohl and Wes, who wound up marrying Svetlana, Wrieto-San’s stepdaughter, and they marked the defining epoch of a long, fortunate and prosperous life. Nine years. I had a nine-year association with greatness, with the man who could sit down and spin out the design for perhaps the single most significant dwelling of the century as if he’d been born with it in his head—I’m talking of Fallingwater here—even as the exasperated client was en route from Milwaukee and expected to pull into the drive at any moment. I witnessed that. I handed him the paper, sharpened the pencils, hung over his shoulder with half a dozen others
in a kind of awe that approached reverence.

  I don’t mean to exaggerate my importance—I was a cog in his machine for a certain period, one of many cogs, that and nothing more. But I knew him and I knew those who knew him when I was still a boy in short pants a whole continent and an ocean away and Taliesin I was rising out of the mists—men like old Dad Signola, the stonemason, whose mark will be there on the yellow dolomite piers for as long as the house stands, and Billy Weston, master carpenter, who lost half his world in service to the vision of it. I knew Mrs. Wright—Olgivanna, Wrieto-San’s third and last wife—and his daughters Svetlana and Iovanna, and I knew the apprentices and the clients and Wrieto-San’s four sons and two daughters from his first marriage. But did I know him?

  There will be complaints, of course—I can foresee that. This is an imperfect process, what with the interposition of the years, the vagaries of memory, the re-creation of scenes the accuracy of which no one now living can affirm or deny. And too, I’ve had to rely on my co-author and translator (the young Irish American Seamus O’Flaherty, who is husband to my granddaughter, Noriko, and whose as yet unpublished translations of Fukazawa and Shimizu are, I understand, quite novel), many of whose locutions seem, I must confess, rather odd in the final analysis. Still, the question remains: Did I know the man we Japanese revere as Wrieto-San? Who was he, after all? The hero who was paraded through the streets of Tokyo after five years’ work on the Imperial Hotel (and cost overruns that nearly bankrupted Baron Ōkura’s backers) to triumphant shouts of “Banzai, Wrieto-San! Banzai!” as he claims in his autobiography? Or the profligate con artist who had to be removed from the site, the job, the country, in disfavor, if not disgrace? Was he the wounded genius or the philanderer and sociopath who abused the trust of practically everyone he knew, especially the women, especially them?

  Tadashi Sato Nagoya, April 9, 1979

  CHAPTER 1: DANCING TO THE DEAD

  On the day he met Olga Lazovich Milanoff Hinzenberg, at a ballet performance in Chicago in the fall of 1924, Frank Lloyd Wright1 was feeling optimistic, buoyant even. It might have been raining that day—it was raining, gray pluvial streaks painting the intermediate distance like a pointillist canvas, stooped figures trudging along the streets beneath the shrouds of their umbrellas, sleet predicted, snow on the way—but his mood was unconquerable. He’d always thought of himself as a genial type, sunny and effervescent, one of those rare people who could transform the mood of an entire room simply by striding through the door, but the emotional upheaval of the past two years—since he’d come back from Japan, at any rate—had worn him down. Miriam was the problem, of course, or the crown and pinnacle of it. There were money woes, certainly. Insufficient commissions, fainthearted clients, and the deep-dwelling ignorance of his countrymen (and cowardice, cowardice too) in the face of the Fauvists, the Futurists, the Dadaists and the Cubists and all the rest of the ists and isms, Duchamp and Braque and Picasso, and worse yet, the soi-disant International Style of Le Corbusier, Gropius, Meyer and Mies—all the movements that had sprung up to make him feel antiquated and embattled. None of that helped. While he was in the Far East, the Europeans had been invading America.

  But things were looking up. Miriam was gone now, gone since May, though every time he closed his eyes over a drawing or the pages of a book he saw her face, the tragic one she wore like a mask, rearing up in his consciousness till it dissolved in a swirl of dark bruised spots. Still, she was gone and Taliesin was at peace again. Three young couples—the Neutras, the Tsuchiuras and the Mosers—had been in residence, and there were musical evenings, good fellowship, the quiet of the fireside. And here he was, back in Chicago on business and stamping the rain from his hat and cloak in the vestibule of the theater, ripe for a little recreation.

  A friend2 had asked him if he’d like to see Karsavina perform selections from “Sleeping Beauty,” “La Fille Mal Gardée” and “Les Sylphides” that afternoon and he’d jumped at the chance, though the prima ballerina’s best days were long behind her and her supramundane beauty was a whisper of what it had been. He wanted to be seen about town, if only to shake some of the lint off the moth-eaten blanket of rumor and outright lies the scandalmongers had laid over him—he’d be opening an office here again at the first of the year and needed to make his presence felt. All right. Fine. The rain fell in the street, the door swung open and shut on the premonitory breath of winter, people crowded the lobby: men in fancy dress or the suits they’d worn to church, women swathed in furs and pearls, their voices sailing away from them to chime and chirrup like the disquisitions of the birds in the aviary at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Were people avoiding him? Wasn’t that—?

  It was. Olivia Westphal, whom he’d once promenaded around Oak Park in his first car (the custom-made Stoddard-Dayton sports roadster that could hit sixty on the straightaway, a car he still dreamed of in the moments before waking, the “Yellow Devil” that had people leaping for the curb and cost him the very first speeding ticket ever issued on those sleepy equine streets), hoping to land a commission to build for her and her new husband (and she’d stabbed him in the back even then, opting to have Patton and Fisher build her an ornamented box of a place that was as insipid as a bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes left out overnight. On the counter. In a puddle of soured milk). And what the years had done to her: she was a matron now, gone to fat in the face and upper arms, with a bulky squared-up figure that all but erased the curvilinear contours he’d once found so enticing. She looked him dead in the eye—recognized him, he saw that—and then looked away again.

  And how did that make him feel? Belligerent. Angry. Disgusted. Let them ignore him, the prudes and the timid little rodents they were married to, afraid all their lives to break ranks, to live, to make the grand gesture, any gesture . . . but now his companion3 had him by the arm and was leading him toward a group of men in the very center of things—was that Robert? Oscar?—and he felt himself swell up till he could hardly keep his cane from pirouetting across the floor. What he didn’t notice—nor did his companion—was the tall dark sober-faced young woman slipping in through the door, her ticket clutched in one gloved hand, her purse in the other. She noticed him, though, her gaze roving over the crowd from the place she’d chosen in the corner—both wanting to be seen and at the same time striving for anonymity, unescorted at a matinee, unattached and at odds with her husband, a devotee of the dance and of what Karsavina had once been, a single woman out on a rainy afternoon. Olgivanna saw the same hats, shoulders, furs and jabbering faces he’d seen, a cotillion, a pecking order, society at large, and then all at once he was there and her eyes seized on him.

  Her first sensation was the thrill of recognizing a celebrated face in public, a jolt of the nervous system that carried with it a hint of self-congratulation, as if she’d come up with the solution to a puzzle in a flash of inspiration. The second thing she felt was that she absolutely must talk to him—a compulsion so strong she very nearly bolted through the crowd to him, though here she was an utter stranger and unescorted and unintroduced, but she suppressed the impulse out of shyness and a vertiginousness verging on panic: What could she possibly say to him? How would she break the ice? Get him to look at her even? And the third thing, a thought clamoring atop the other two and cloaked in a rush of hormonal flapping, was that he would know her on some deep unfathomable level, as if it were fated, as if they were reincarnated lovers out of the Mahabharata or Rice Burroughs—and more: that he would take her to himself, master her in a fierce blend of power and submission.4

  Frank5 was oblivious. He was the center of attention, preening and performing for the little group that had gathered round him, old friends and fellows-well-met, joking, laughing, carting out one story after another and making his deadpan observations about this couple or that—and let them look, let them—when the start of the program was announced and Albert took him by the arm and they made their way to a box in front. As it happened, Albert slid in first, taking the seat adjoining a vac
ant one, and Frank settled in on his right. The lights dimmed. The conductor rose from the pit, his arms elevated over the score. And then, at the last minute, Olgivanna drifted gracefully down the center aisle, a moving shadow against the backdrop of the stage. The usher stood aside, the curtain rising now, the audience stirring, and here was her seat, and she barely had time to register the unremarkable figure beside her before the music began and the dancers appeared and she realized with a jolt that he was there, right there, one seat over from her.

  For his part, Frank had glanced up as she slipped into her seat—a reflex of the human organism: there’s a movement, the eye goes to it—just as he would have glanced up at anyone, the cows from the lobby or the stuffed shirts they were with or even one of his sworn enemies. A glance, that was all, but he liked what he saw. She was hatless, with minimal makeup, her hair parted in the middle and drawn up in a chignon, a lace shawl clinging to her shoulders. He registered that—the simplicity of her dress and style, a kind of purity and faith in her own beauty that stood all the rest of the puffed-up, powdered and behatted matrons on their heads, and the way she’d moved, a tall young woman in her twenties, sliding into a seat at the ballet with a balletic grace all her own. He stole another glance. And then another.

  There was movement on the stage now, a burst of applause as Karsavina appeared—her legs good still, her face less so—and its dying fall. He was conscious of silent effort, of women and men twirling and wobbling like bowling pins that won’t go down, and he understood immediately that this would be a mediocre performance by an artist in decline. A bore. A wasted afternoon. He bent forward to look past Albert. The young woman—she was a girl, really—sat quietly with her hands folded in her lap, her gaze fixed on the stage. Her carriage was flawless, from the way she held her shoulders to the swell of her breasts to the pronounced lines of her jaw and cheekbone in profile, the beautifully scalloped ear and the pale jewel that glittered at the lobe of it—minimalist, everything about her a studied composition of the minimal. But she wasn’t an American girl—he would have bet on it.