Loving Frank

by Nancy Horan

  Panic began to expand like a balloon in her chest.

  “We’ve got to leave here. We need to find someplace else. Immediately.”

  She rose, pulled on her shoes. “I noticed a couple of little places in Wilmersdorf.” She could make her voice calm when she was afraid and she did it now. “I’ll take the trolley. I’m sure I can find something.”

  “It won’t amount to a hill of beans, because Catherine won’t talk.”

  “They were at your house?”

  “And my mother’s.”

  WHEN SHE RETURNED, Frank was already packed. He helped her throw her things into her traveling bags. While he checked out, she walked toward the banquette in the bar, where a group of dandyish young men was drinking and laughing. Mamah slid into a chair near a clutch of other women so as not to be noticed. Two of the men were in high spirits. One of them she recognized as the man in the mink-lapeled coat whom she had seen on the elevator a couple of times. Another man at the end of the banquette dragged on a cigarette, then leaned his head back and made smoke rings for the amusement of the others. She noticed that his shoes were cheap and flashy. Reporters, she thought.

  “There’s no forwarding address,” Frank said loudly over at the reception desk. “We’re headed to Japan.”

  In the taxi, Frank’s rage grew. “I’m putting Wasmuth on notice.” He craned his neck. “Driver,” he said suddenly, “Thirty-five Markgrafen Strasse.” He talked intensely to himself. “If he wants this deal to go through, he will tell his employees to keep their mouths shut.”

  Mamah waited in the taxi while Frank went into Wasmuth’s office. When he emerged, he carried two large portfolios and a stack of mail.

  “What happened?” she asked. Frank had been inside the building fifteen minutes, at least. “Did you see Wasmuth?”

  “No,” he said. “He wasn’t there.”

  SHE HAD CHOSEN a residential hotel in a western suburb of the city that rented rooms by the night. It was the least likely place they would be found, she thought. They hauled their bags to the second floor.

  “I can’t work in these conditions,” he said, straining to get the last bag up from the landing. In the room, he thudded into a chair next to a table. “What do I have? A few months to perform a miracle, and already I’ve lost most of a month.”

  “It’s just temporary. I’ll find something better in the morning.” It was her brave voice speaking.

  He pulled a letter from his mother out of his pocket and slit it open with a fingernail. “What made me think I could escape it?”

  Mamah lay down on the bed, still dressed in her coat, and stretched out her arms and legs. In a few minutes she would get up and she would be strong. She could calm him because she had done it before, even when she was afraid. Her muscles ached from lifting the bags. She was bone-weary and knew why: It was the tension that had dogged them from the beginning of the journey.

  The sound of shattering plaster caused her to fly up from the mattress.

  “Goddammit!” Frank was shouting.

  She looked over to see a gaping hole in the wall where his foot had kicked all the way through to furring strips between the studs. Mamah leaped off the bed, confused, to see him sink back down into the chair and put his face in his hands. Her eyes went from his bent head to a letter and clippings on the table.

  She stepped tentatively over to look, the words Chicago Sunday Tribune becoming visible as she approached. It was from the front page of the November 7 issue.

  LEAVE FAMILIES; ELOPE TO EUROPE

  ARCHITECT FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

  AND MRS. EDWIN CHENEY

  OF OAK PARK STARTLE FRIENDS.

  ABANDONED WIFE LOYAL.

  SPOUSE VICTIM OF A VAMPIRE, SHE SAYS,

  AND WILL RETURN WHEN HE CAN;

  OTHER’S HUSBAND SILENT.

  Mamah put her hand to her mouth as she read the first paragraph.

  A wife pledging faith in a husband gone with another woman…two abandoned homes where children play at the hearthsides, and a fly-by-night journey through Germany—these are features which make an affinity tangle of a character unparalleled even in the checkered history of soul mating.

  What she saw next caused her to cry out. In the upper-right corner of page seven of the November 9 paper, her own face filled nearly a quarter of the page. Above it, a headline read, WIFE WHO RAN AWAY WITH ARCHITECT. The photograph was the portrait she’d had made for her marriage announcement. It was labeled MRS. E. H. CHENEY.

  She pressed her lips together, but the cries kept pushing up from her chest and into her throat, like the screams of an injured animal.

  CHAPTER 21

  “I can never go back now.” Mamah’s face was bloated from crying.

  “You can and you will. This thing will blow over.”

  “No,” she said, “I’m dead.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  Frank left the suite then, and when he returned, he brought soup and a bottle of wine from a restaurant on the block. Mamah didn’t eat. Instead, she stared out the window at the leafless trees and drank the wine. After some time, he helped her up and put her to bed. When he left the room, she went to her suitcase and pulled out a bottle of cough syrup. She drank some, then put it beneath the mattress.

  Frank was gone when she woke the next day. Mamah got up and stood at the door to the hotel room, listening for his footsteps. Then she went to the table and read the clippings again.

  MRS. WRIGHT’S FAITH UNSHAKEN.

  “My heart is with him now,” Mrs. Wright said to a reporter for the Tribune yesterday. “He will come back as soon as he can. I have a faith in Frank Wright that passeth understanding, perhaps, but I know him as no one else knows him. In this instance he is as innocent of real wrongdoing as I am….

  “It appears like any ordinary mundane affair, with the trappings of what is low and vulgar. But there is nothing of that sort about Frank Wright. He is honest and sincere. I know him. I tell you I know him. I have fought side by side with him. My heart is with him now. I feel certain that he will come back. When, I don’t know. It will be when he has reached a certain decision with himself.”

  Mamah could almost see Catherine standing at the door, her golden-red hair twisted in a Gibson Girl chignon. She was a handsome, dignified-looking woman.

  “The world cannot possibly understand all that is involved in this affair. Is it not enough to know that I shall take no action for divorce, that I shall make no appeal whatever to the courts, that I stand by my husband right at this moment? I am his wife. He loves his children tenderly now and has the greatest anxiety for their welfare. He will come back to them and live down the publicity to conquer in the end. They can heap everything they wish to on me and I will bear it willingly and my place will remain here in his home.”

  Frank had been wrong about Catherine. She had talked after all. Mamah imagined the reporter telling her, “This is your chance to tell your side of it.” Reading down the column, Mamah’s eyes found Catherine’s pain again and again.

  “His whole life has been a struggle. When he came here as a young architect he had to fight against every existing idea in architecture. He did fight, year after year, against obstacles that would have downed an ordinary man…. He has fought the most tremendous battles. He is fighting one now and I know he will win. I have fought it beside him and the struggle has made me. Whatever I am as a woman, aside from my good birth, I owe to the example of my husband…. There should not be the same moral gateway for all of us.”

  Mamah retrieved the cough syrup and swigged from the bottle. Her eyes fell on the small headline she had seen the night before that caused her to fall back against the pillows.

  “SIMPLY A CASE OF A VAMPIRE.”

  “We have six children. The oldest boy is 19 and he is home from college now. They worship their father and love their mother. If I only could protect them now I would care for nothing else. With regard to Mrs. Cheney, I have nothing to say. I have striven to pu
t her out of my thoughts in connection with the situation. It is simply a force against which we have had to contend. I have never felt that I breathed the same air with her. It was simply a case of a vampire—you have heard of such things.”

  Mamah climbed into bed. She felt a shame more sickening than anything she had ever known or imagined.

  Catherine. Edwin. Lizzie. What horrors had they been subjected to? She imagined Edwin’s humiliation at being portrayed as a cuckold. And Lizzie, who had spent most of her life trying not to be noticed, what hell had been visited upon her? One headline had said, simply, MRS. CHENEY’S SISTER IN CHARGE.

  It was John she thought of most. Martha wouldn’t understand what was going on, but John would know something was terribly amiss; he would be suffering now.

  The hands of a small clock on the side table approached the nine o’clock hour. She counted the clock’s ticks, waiting for the medicine to dull the terrible ache in her chest. And she thanked God that her parents were dead, especially her mother.

  Mamah thought of the day she had bought the cough syrup. Sitting in St. Hedwig’s Church, she had picked up a pamphlet on the pew and read about the church’s namesake. The saint had worn a hair shirt and slept on the floor, the usual sorts of mortifications. But Hedwig had her own specialties. She surrounded herself with beggars when she traveled—thirteen of them, always thirteen—whose sole purpose was to have their feet washed by her at the end of the day. Good luck for Hedwig was coming upon a leper who allowed her to kiss his ulcers.

  A madwoman, Mamah had thought at the time. Now she would welcome the chance to kiss a leper’s sores if it meant she could undo the headlines.

  Mamah lifted the clipping with her picture in it.

  CHENEY CHAMPION OF RUNAWAY WIFE

  OAK PARK MAN HAS NO BLAME

  FOR WOMAN WHO ELOPED

  WITH FRANK L. WRIGHT.

  CABLES MAY HALT THEM.

  FRIENDS HOPE TO INTERCEPT

  “SOUL MATES” BEFORE THEY GET

  ON WAY TO JAPAN.

  A new phase of the Wright-Cheney “spiritual hegira” developed yesterday when the husband…

  They had bushwhacked Edwin at Wagner Electric.

  “Mrs. Cheney has been getting the worst end of this deal right along, and it is not fair,” he said. “Those of her friends who understand the situation know that she should not be blamed in the way she has been…. We would all be grateful if the matter were allowed to drop now. With reference to divorce proceedings or any course I may see fit to pursue in the future I have nothing to say.”

  Edwin, she thought. Loyal Edwin.

  Friends said Mr. Cheney for more than a year had suspected Wright, but that family relations had been such that an out-and-out breach would occasion gossip and for that reason he held his peace. Mrs. Cheney has been known to her friends as of a highly temperamental disposition, capricious, and sentimental to a degree. She was a graduate of Ann Arbor and had strong literary inclinations. Mrs. Cheney’s sister, who teaches school, lives with them. There is a nursery governess for the two children. Mrs. Cheney is said to have spent little time with them.

  Mamah lay flat on the bed. Mrs. Cheney is said to have spent little time with them.

  Floating pictures of Martha passed across her closed eyes. She saw her at nine months old, with fat tiny feet. She was climbing up Mamah’s body as if it were a mountain. She planted a foot on her mother’s hip, then pushed herself upward, clutching Mamah’s nightgown as she ascended. Up she came, crawling over her belly, then scaling her breasts until she was face-to-face with her mother. The startling blue eyes. Laughs and merriment. The smell of talcum.

  A squeaking door hinge roused her.

  “You can’t hide in there forever.” Frank was standing beside the bed. He looked vibrant, almost in good humor.

  “Someone has been watching us.”

  “The Medusa speaks.” Frank set down the food he had brought, another bowl of soup. “Eat this. We’ll talk when it’s down your gullet.”

  Mamah tipped the bowl and drank the broth. “Everything is lost.” Her own voice was dull and faraway.

  “You’re slurring your words. Just eat.” Frank took the empty cough-syrup bottle and tossed it into a wastebasket. “This will pass, Mamah. In a few weeks you can return quietly, if you want, and the thing will have blown over. Those articles were already ten days old by the time they got here.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We are going to live our lives. We may have to leave Berlin, but I’m going to finish the portfolio.” His composure was stunning. “Do you think I’ll hand over my hide so easily?”

  Tears began again.

  “No more crying. Come on, up you go.” He put his hands under her arms and pulled her limp body to the edge of the bed, then helped her walk to the bathroom. “Will you be all right?”

  She nodded. He slipped out the door and closed it softly.

  Mamah gripped the sink and glimpsed herself in the mirror. I look insane, she thought.

  She sat on the side of the bathtub, turned on the water, and watched it run and run. When the tub nearly overflowed, she put her arm in to drain out some water, and the skin came up pink. She took off her gown and stepped in, grateful for the burn. Sliding down low into the tub, she let the water fill her open mouth and lap into her nostrils.

  Breathe in.

  The door opened at that moment, and Frank appeared like a specter in the steam, holding a towel and a clean gown.

  “Come on, sweetheart.” He lifted her out of the tub. “We’re going to make you well.”

  IN THE MORNING, she rose while he slept, went to the table, and picked up a clipping. To read it would be to peel back another layer of her heart, yet she couldn’t stop herself. This article quoted a sermon that was delivered the day after the first headline appeared.

  PASTOR REBUKES AFFINITY FOOLS

  “Affinity fools” was discussed by the Rev. Frederick E. Hoskins last night in Pilgrim Congregational Church. He spoke about the woman who becomes weary of the hardworking husband and tires of her home life.

  Mamah actually remembered Hoskins from her one visit to Pilgrim Church. He had seemed to her a pompous Billy Sunday type who fancied himself amusing but was really a pinched, angry man. Yet the people around her had seemed genuinely moved by him.

  “She tries to make herself think she understands a lot of gab from the platform of her club about the larger, the fuller life, and her ‘sphere.’ Along happens a knave. Together they begin to think and talk about how they understand each other. They look a long time at each other in silence and breathe deep, like an old sitting hen. What wonderful things they discover together, and how different the world looks through each other’s eyes. Thus they proceed through weeks and months of slush, until one day there is a splash, and both have tumbled into the same old hog pen, where thousands have tumbled before them.”

  Mamah moaned. No question. It was about her.

  When Frank found her holding the article, he ripped it from her hand and crumpled it. “Mamah,” he said. “Please don’t do this to yourself.” He pressed his fingers into her shoulders. “Please.”

  “Don’t you see how hopeless this is?”

  “You can’t buckle!” He stomped away, his arms waving. It was the first time he had ever directed a shout at her. She felt cowed. “I need you now. This is when you show who you are.”

  She stared at him, shaken by his anger. “It’s the children,” she said. “They’ll take them away.”

  “You don’t lose your children because some idiot writes an article in the newspaper or some preacher talks about affinities. Can one week negate who you have been to your children for the whole of their lives? How odd for me to be the one saying these things to you. You. Have you forgotten the very things you’ve said to me? You can’t keep your children by having no life of your own. You said that once to me. You said, ‘They will know. Your own unhappiness will plant the seeds of unhappiness in y
our children. And they will blame you for it someday.’ I believed you when you said that.”

  “I was speaking about my own mother. How she made selflessness her profession rather than…I never dreamed—”

  “I know you are suffering. Look, people go through terrible things in their lives. My mother’s family went through years of persecution before they came over to the States. And do you know what it did to them after a while? It actually made them tougher. I’ve told you what their family motto is: ‘Truth against the world.’ It takes some hard knocks to develop an outlook like that.

  “I’ve never been like other people. Not other fathers, not other businessmen. I have never fit into any social norm. And you know what? I don’t want to.”

  Frank seemed tuned to an interior compass. There was no arrogance or braggadocio. This was the wise, fearless man she had fallen in love with.

  “So does this mess mean we bow to their rules? That we say ‘We’re no good, we don’t deserve happiness’?” He looked at her squarely. “I don’t think we’re bad people, Mamah. I hurt like hell for my children. Even for her. But that doesn’t mean I’m turning back now.

  “We’re going to leave this place. Wasmuth is working on lining up something in Florence. In the meantime, we’ll go to Paris. It’s big and anonymous. Then Italy. Wasmuth says you can disappear there.”

  He walked to the bed and pulled her up. “Let’s get some breakfast.”

  “Won’t they see us?”

  “Who? And do I give a damn?”