I arrived on an empty train in Poissy as commuters left for the city and passed harsh concrete apartment blocks shadowing narrow old roads. I felt invisible, and suddenly foolish, a dilettante. Who was I to go searching after modern buildings? I wasn’t an architecture student. I was a girl who wrote in a journal, who was lost and confused about how to proceed with my life. I walked up a long curving hill, past the humming Simca car factory and a concrete-walled prison. The road curved until it crowned the hill. Overlooking the smoggy, densely built Seine Valley, my heart beat rapidly, from the effort of the hill, from anticipation, and with an urgency for my life to mean something. I believed, strangely, that writing to my father about the house would leave a trace that I had lived, more than simply existing.
I followed a long metal fence to a gate, where I read a tarnished brass plaque: Les Heures Claires (Villa Savoye), visiting hours, a button to push. After the elderly caretaker unlocked the gate, she and her friendly German Shepherd escorted me through an old forest. We followed the over-grown drive toward a distant image, which at first looked like a grainy black and white photograph, a compact, age-stained concrete structure, dwarfed by a long multi-story high school which blocked the view towards Paris. Once I focused on just the little building, it changed, becoming the sculpture I knew by heart.
I was walking over the drive I’d cut out of sandpaper when my father and I made the model for French class six years before. The house was unexpectedly small. The grid of white slender columns, pilotis, carried the weight. Walls like white ribbon wrapped around the house and the windows—cutouts of dark and light. The house watched us as we drew near, our footsteps crunching on gravel. I remembered the ground floor walls we’d cut and glued into place, and the curve, the perfect turning radius, for a car to be driven into the garage.
The Shepherd ran ahead. The grandmotherly caretaker, holding her worn sweater at the neck against the chill, let me know I had the house to myself. We walked under the overhang following the curve of the glass wall, narrow slices of glass edged with metal, until we reached the wide black door. She unlocked it. “Et voilà, Mademoiselle,” and left me alone.
I thought I knew this house. I’d learned to read plans on this house. I’d put my eyes to the cardboard windows and doorways. I knew how a person would walk through the space. I had imagined walking on the roof, with its curving walls and no ceiling. I was sure I knew what it would be like to enter those familiar rooms.
As I entered the ground floor, the entryway was disheveled and smelled of raw plaster, construction debris littering the floor. As I proceeded up the ramp to reach La Salle, the living/dining room, I was stunned by sadness. At first glance the walls were bare, stained, forlorn, a home without a family. I’d read that the Nazis and later the Allies stabled cows here, storing hay and feed in these rooms. I shuddered. Were there bullet holes in the walls? I walked around the abandoned rooms; the edges where dirty glass windows met the wall felt harsh and unforgiving. Loneliness crept into me like the chilled winter air.
Exterior ramp at Villa Savoye, 1973
Disappointed, I opened a glass door and walked across the terrace to one end and looked up. Suddenly, the design from the outside—the curving walls on the roof, the grid of interior and exterior spaces, and a glowing whiteness—blossomed into a thrill in my mind. Every view became exquisite. Even though the sky was a heavy grey, threatening rain, the house glowed with light.
I was no longer an observer walking through a building. I was in connection with the house as I walked up the ramp to the roof, pausing with each step to look in each direction, studying how the lines of the white walls and the proportions changed. The faded winter meadow was framed by each curve of shimmering white walls. The sensual white walls in the rooftop garden carved the sky. A cutout window framed a view of open space beyond. To be in this terrace room with walls and no ceiling was to have weight and shadow lifted from me. I thought of desert people who build terrace gardens, where they gather for meals, or pray under the vast sky. Corbusier had written, “Suppose that walls (in a house) rise towards heaven in such a way that I am moved.” I was. On this terrace I felt alive.
When I opened the door to proceed down the twirling spiral staircase, I became part of a sculpture, a black and white composition that changed with every turn. A child of modernism, I felt transformed in the white spiral heart of the house. I was bringing the house alive. I entered the imagination of the man who had envisioned pleasure in the way the spiral stair met the hallway. He was guiding my eyes. I was seeing what he had wanted to be seen. I was a girl who had studied Corbu since childhood, who had turned the pages of photographs and plans like a fairy tale. This was My Corbu.
I explored the house, in communion with its creator. I felt the rhythm of white horizontal lines ridging the triangle windows of glass. A tiny sky-blue wall below a skylight drew my eye to the heavens. A deep blue wall led to the bedrooms. I wrote: “A divine orange wall in the living room.” Entering the master bedroom, small shimmering blue tiles were set in a Roman bath drenched with diffused winter light. A bather could recline here, like a Modigliani nude, waiting to be admired.
I didn’t know that the initial roof had leaked so badly that rain poured down the spiral stairs and skylights, until the family abandoned the house, threatening lawsuits until it was made livable. I was captivated by a cold white passion, a romanticized love for Early Modern, a trained awe for efficiently engineered steamships and motorcars. I was an enraptured girl, yet unaware of the slow chill in an ice palace of pure design.
Immersed in the play of Corbu’s mind, I realized he eclipsed my father. I was no longer going to my father, a devoted priest, but praying directly to his paternal god. I took communion from the curving white walls. Descending the spiral was the beginning of freedom from being enthralled by my father. Maybe this is what leaving home is for. I was actually entering my own true life, not the life I imagined as a girl when I read Corbu’s white books of plans.
I discovered, on that grey February morning west of Paris, on a spiral stair, the vastness of my own enthusiasm. As I wrote furiously into my aerogrammes, I felt thrilled with the idea of a life I was creating. My own separate life.
In going to my father’s Mecca that he never succeeded in visiting, I discovered that my life could go beyond my father’s. I didn’t have to stay the child, waiting and yearning for his attention to bring me alive.
I now knew I could be the author of my own life, not knowing how long that would take.
JAGUAR
1973-75
Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us... They are magnified dreams.
—JOSEPH CAMPBELL, THE POWER OF MYTH
BEFORE I LEFT HOME FOR FRANCE, MY FATHER AND I stood in the driveway of the glass house, gazing with mutual appreciation at his white gleaming XKE Jaguar. In 1972, this 1967 E Type was already a classic; the sexy angled glass over the headlights had been replaced in the newer models with a more economical, practical vertical headlight. A Jaguar was synonymous with Modern, with the black leather and walnut Eames chair, with a man who knew wine, who was cultured. And this car had been mine. I’d returned from my jaunt to the East Coast. I’d vacuumed, scrubbed, waxed, and polished every inch of that car to keep my end of the bargain, to sell the car for $2,500 to pay for my year in France. In the end he wouldn’t sell her yet, she was too beautiful. He planned to take one last trip in the Jag.
“But I still want to teach you about the value of money!” His voice boomed, filling this valley below the house and the steep slope leading to the gardens. “Look at this car. Now imagine what your college tuition will be.”
I couldn’t. Tuition was a vague concept, a bill I’d send to my father. I had gathered up an array of college applications so I could apply from France. I’d been a good student, I’d write a fascinating essay justifying my two years of adventures before starting college, he’d fill out the financial aid forms, and then he’d cover the rest. That�
�s all I thought there was to it. I was a privileged girl growing up in a wealthy village inside the most magnificent house I’d ever seen. I had no idea that my father had no work, that he would never design a major building again. None of us knew that. He was a robust bull of a man at fifty-nine, who could manhandle mammoth granite curbstones into place with his bulldozer and pry bars. He was my dad, and we could stand talking about Jags in the driveway, and the craziness of what had happened inside the glass house would vanish. I’d forget the rage that curled in my belly like a cornered animal.
He said, “Look at this car.” My eyes lingered over the engineered sweep of the hood, remembering the ten days she’d been mine. Remembering my left hand on the polished wooden steering wheel, my right on the stick shift, a fine-tuned team of precision as I negotiated winding roads, wheels gripping the road as precisely as a Swiss train held to tight curves through the Alps. I was my father’s daughter; he’d brought me up in his own image.
With his hands on his hips, he cocked his head and his grey eyes bore into mine. “Imagine twenty Jaguars.”
I laughed. A crazy thing, but they populated my mind and I saw them. Filling the parking area where we stood, one after another, shining bumper to bumper, all tops down, all convertibles, red leather seats glowing like embers, long lean white bodies lining the drive, down the hill, across the creek, extending along the drive up to our neighbors. Gleaming. White. Jags.
“That’s what your college tuition would cost me.”
His arms flew upward like falcons lifting off and flying in different directions, he looked me square in the face and shrugged in a way that implied it was obvious. He strode away. I didn’t understand. I was left looking at the single Jaguar, confused, not knowing the lesson he’d meant me to understand. Not knowing that the $2,500 he would give me to manage on a tight budget for my year in France would be the last money he would pay for my college education. Not knowing yet what he really meant by flinging up his strong hands in the late summer light.
WHEN I APPLIED to colleges from France in 1973, most architects were caught without work in a recession, but my father didn’t want anyone to know. He was paranoid, didn’t trust the forms were confidential. He was finishing up his last design jobs for the University of Cincinnati. He didn’t want them to know he had no other work. In the spring, when I returned home, I’d been accepted to colleges but was awarded no financial aid. Only then, when I asked my father, did he tell me he hadn’t filled out the forms. I couldn’t go. I sank, defeated. I couldn’t go to college? And that’s all I wanted to do.
In my parents’ divorce decree he’d agreed to pay the equivalent of University of Cincinnati tuition. I was determined. Okay, if I couldn’t go away to school, I’d start that summer, even if it was in my own town, even if it had to be UC. I rolled my eyes; that was where just ‘anybody’ could go. But I would go. I would put in a year, and then transfer. I’d get good grades so I could get financial aid. When the $350 bill came for summer school tuition, my father refused to pay. He could have said, I don’t have the money. He could have said, let’s figure this out together. He was living in the glass house valued in the hundreds of thousands on acres of gardens in a wealthy village, but he couldn’t say he didn’t have the money to pay his own bills. My father was an enraged bull when I sent him the tuition bill, screaming at me, “You can’t tell me what to do. No one ever tells me what to do,” before slamming down the phone.
MY MOTHER GEARED up for battle. On her $10,000 a year job as a probation officer, she hired her lawyer again to take my father to court. Years later, after my father died, as we cleared through his old tax statements, we found that he made $6,000 that year—and spent $4,000 of it on lawyers to fight paying my year’s tuition as a U.C. off-campus student. We lost in court. The judge stated, “You can’t enforce a divorce decree for children over eighteen. Those promises depend on the good will of the parents.”
My mother figured out how to squeeze my tuition out of her tight budget. I lived with her and my brother Woodie in a one-bedroom apartment across from campus. I slept on a daybed in the small dining room, squeezed my desk in the front hallway. My mom slept on the unheated porch. My brother Woodie had the tiny dark bedroom and stashed his pot and acid in the upright freezer that dominated his room, where my mom kept farm produce we froze in the summer. She joked that she’d get fired if anyone found out, either because they’d think she was stupid not to know that he was using drugs or because she did know and didn’t stop him.
My mother knew my brother was hanging by a thread, knew that the best thing was that he felt safe, had a home where he was loved and where his friends could come. My brother calculated how many classes he could flunk and still graduate from high school, even though his SAT scores soared above mine. He came home, hands and clothes greasy, from his job at a garage down the street, and sat with his friends, stoned and laughing around my mother’s dinner table. I hunched over my desk in the front hall reading Virginia Woolf.
The night before my first Introduction to Psychology class, I lay awake. No one knew my secret terror that I wasn’t smart. What if I couldn’t make it in college, like my aunts and uncles with their Phi Beta Kappas and PhDs? Walking to class that hot summer, I’d double over with a spasm of pain in my belly that grabbed so hard I couldn’t stand up. I’d crouch down in the grass, trying to look fascinated with a flower or my book, disguising my shame, until I could calm my breathing, relax my belly, and walk again. Eventually I saw a doctor who said I had a spastic colon because I was an overly sensitive young woman.
Freshman classes were big and uninspiring. Nothing I thought or wrote stood out. Maybe I was a boring thinker. Maybe my mind was middle-of-the-road. My fear increased. If I couldn’t make it here, where could I? Maybe I wasn’t whom I’d always thought I was. One day as I sat on a bench on campus, an older man peered into my face before he spoke encouragingly. “Can’t you smile? It’s not all that bad.” Embarrassed, I tried, but it didn’t last.
I read Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, and wondered how my life would fit in the hero’s journey. When the fall semester’s list of classes included a graduate seminar in Mythology, I appealed to the dean and gained permission to join four grad students. In a little room on the top floor overlooking the campus, a young red-bearded professor, who had just completed his PhD in Celtic Studies from Harvard, pulled back a veil like a magician, showing us patterns in the stories of ancient cultures. In the library, I discovered folklore concordances where I could trace details from fairy tales—three brothers, youngest sisters, wicked stepmothers, poisoned apples—in variations around the world. I read theories pointing out that a tripartite system of class (king/ priests, warriors, and farmers) in Indo-European society was echoed in myths. We studied parallels between Greek and Nordic mythology: Zeus and Odin were the highest-ranking sovereign leaders, Poseidon and Thor were warriors, and Demeter and Freyr were connected to the fecundity of the land. I’d never known the heady pleasure of losing myself in study, hours vanishing into ideas.
My first paper argued that a tripartite system existing in Nordic mythology could be found in Icelandic sagas. My professor wrote, “This was as good a paper as I’ve ever read, either here or at Harvard.” Harvard! From that moment I was filled with certainty; I knew the map of my journey. I would go to Harvard to become a Professor of Mythology and Folklore. But how was I to get there? I had no idea. All I knew was that I had to transfer out of Ohio and leave home. My father couldn’t stop me anymore. I was my mother’s daughter now, and as her dependent I qualified for financial aid. Naïve, I had no idea how my father’s legacy would continue to haunt me.
From my professor’s glowing recommendation, the next fall I entered the white-trimmed brick quad at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore’s sticky heat. Dominated by pre-meds, the small group of Humanities students were welcoming, with friendly professors’ doors open to us at all hours of the day. My first class was a seminar on the Odyssey, a handful o
f students around a table; the young professor with curling hair and a profile like a Greek hero stood at the board, writing a word first in Greek characters and then English, menos. I was worried.
He explained, “Menos is usually translated as confidence or strength, particularly strength that is breathed in. Athena could breathe menos into a hero. In the beginning of The Odyssey, when she disguised herself to help Telemachos discover the fate of his father, she called herself Mentes. She is encouraging him to become the man he is meant to be.” Professor Nagy (pronounced nadj) continued scrawling words across the board, as he switched effortlessly from English to Greek, Hittite to Indic. His enthusiasm warmed us as we followed his leaps of connection effortlessly.
He continued, “But menos isn’t for heroes only. This breathing strength of mind flows in the sun, in fire, moist winds and rivers.” Dr. Nagy kept going back in time, tracing menos to manas from Indic poetry where it meant not only the strength that made the sun rise and the wind to come but was also the power of the poet, the strength that was breathed in from the cosmos. Professor Nagy paused; the delight in his eyes made them more penetrating. “What is the strength that is latent in you that has to be breathed in by the gods?”
I left the class trembling, as if I’d been a torch soaked in oil and the lecture was the match. All I wanted to do was study The Odyssey and find the underpinnings of earlier mythic stories. With boundless enthusiasm, Dr. Nagy encouraged me. “You’ve got to learn Homeric Greek. I’ll tutor you. Keep at it all summer and you’ll be up to speed by fall so we can continue working together.”
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