by Nancy Horan
Sitting at her desk, she had a clear view to the south and west; she could see who was coming and going. Now it was only workmen or Jennie’s family. Still, it was a useful thing, to command a long view. She thought again of the fortresslike houses on the hills around Siena, situated so that no enemy could approach without being seen.
Had Frank suspected that they would come under siege? Had he thought of Taliesin as some sort of fortress? The idea seemed utterly contrary to the openness of the place. A year ago, when he had appeared in Berlin so full of passion about building Taliesin, he had understood something she hadn’t comprehended at that point. He had gotten a mouthful of the intractable hatred some people felt for him. No wonder he was so adamant about starting to build right then. He couldn’t have seen ahead to the cruelty of the past couple of months. But he had prepared for it nonetheless.
At least we have heat now, she thought. It was a vast improvement. A real gift, actually. Heat was something people took for granted until it suddenly wasn’t there. What did a person need to survive? Food. Water. Shelter. Warmth in cold weather. Those simple things were helping both of them heal.
And something else—books. In January Frank had hired Josiah to build bookshelves for Mamah’s new study. The young man was working on a job elsewhere but had come out to Taliesin evenings and weekends until the shelves were finished. She had unpacked her books, dusting and arranging them by subject and author on the beautiful new shelves, all the while thinking about what volumes she could buy when she had a little money. She arranged in a row her journals, scribbled edge to edge with thoughts and quotes, and stuffed fat with slips of papers on which she’d copied more thoughts and quotes. She’d barely had time to dip into her subscription magazines, sent in care of Frank’s sister Jennie during the past half year. Now they were piled neatly in a basket—six months’ worth of thought on women’s issues, as well as fiction stories, waiting to be savored like expensive chocolates.
There was almost no money. But the pleasure of sitting among the gold-lettered spines in the company of George Eliot, Ibsen, Shakespeare, Plato, Emerson, Freud, and Emma Goldman brought some relief.
Frank had found his own kind of relief. When he was not in Chicago, he was at Taliesin with her, but his mind was somewhere in the countryside beyond Kyoto, wandering over bridges and through the snowy mountains of Hiroshige landscapes. He would go into the vault, take out the prints, and pore over them in his studio, rising from time to time to crank up his Victrola and listen to the structured clarity of Mozart or Bach. The prints and music were better than nerve medicine for him.
“You should write about Japanese art,” she told him one evening. They were seated once more in front of the fireplace. His resting spot was a Morris chair with wide, flat armrests; hers was smaller in scale, with the back and arms upholstered in old wine-colored velvet. “You’re an expert by now,” she went on. “This is a chance to educate other people. You may never again have the time to do it.”
He rubbed the day’s bristly growth on his chin, considering. His face in profile reminded her of a handsome bust of Beethoven—the fine nose and mouth, the thoughtful brow met by a mane of long, backswept hair. In the eight years she had known him, he had grown more handsome, the increasingly gray hair giving him new dignity and power.
“You keep saying you’ll lose money if you sell the prints now—that you have to hold them for a while to make a profit,” she said. “Well, I see another way to make them profitable. Japonism is all the rage. Why don’t you write a book about how to understand the Japanese print?”
Within the hour, he had embarked upon the project.
SETTLED AND ORGANIZED, Mamah returned to her own work. Along with the painful letter Ellen had sent last November, she had included two essays for Mamah to translate. The one Mamah had begun was “Missbrauchte Frauenkraft”—” The Misuse of Woman’s Strength.” Ellen had published it in Sweden seventeen years earlier, in 1895. Mamah knew very little of it. A few pages into translating, she felt a growing sense of unease.
Ellen was arguing that women’s energy should be used for child rearing, that suffragists were wrongheaded to focus so intently on jobs and equal pay when motherhood was their legitimate work. For a woman to rush out seeking men’s work was to abandon her post by the cradle as the shaper of the human race. Far better, Ellen argued, that the emancipators worked toward rewarding and enhancing the job of “mother.”
It was not the first time Mamah had come upon the argument. Ellen had leveled it in Love and Ethics, too. But it had not been the main focus.
“She’s taking potshots at suffragists in this ‘Misuse of Woman’s Strength’ essay.” Mamah was frying onions at the stove. Frank sat at the kitchen table, shaving into perfect points the soft lead of his drawing pencils.
“It’s funny,” Mamah said. “I remember when I first met Else at the café in Berlin. One of the women at the table—a woman named Hedwig—called Ellen Key ‘the wise fool of the Woman Movement.’ I was puzzled when she said it, but so much was happening that night…
“About a month later, I ran into Hedwig. I sat down with her in the café and asked her what she had meant. She explained to me that Ellen is revered in Europe for being the champion of the new morality, but she is despised by suffragists for something she did back in 1896. It seems she made a speech to a women’s congress and attacked the whole suffrage movement because she thought they placed equal pay and the vote above the mother function, which she stated is the only truly legitimate work for women. Apparently, the speech sent shock waves throughout Europe. Ellen had loads of devout followers, and the speech turned many of them away from the suffrage cause. Hedwig said she set back the movement in Germany by a decade.”
“Ellen Key?” Frank looked at Mamah incredulously.
“Yes. I guess Ellen came to Berlin a few years after that and endorsed suffrage, but the damage had been done. The movement is still trying to recover from the schism she created.
“And here’s the interesting part. That speech she delivered back in 1896? It was called ‘Missbrauchte Frauenkraft’—‘The Misuse of Woman’s Strength.’ The very document I have on my desk. The very thing she wants me to translate and communicate to the women of America.”
“So you’re afraid if you publish it, it will set back the movement here.”
“Absolutely. I’d love to just throw the thing away, but she clearly wants me to get it out to the public. What amazes me is that she can still believe it in 1912.”
“People have blind spots.”
“But it’s so antithetical to everything she’s written about personal freedom. And she holds some sway now. That’s what I’ve been meaning to tell you. Women are actually reading Ellen Key now.”
“Really? That’s big news. How do you know?”
“From a couple of magazine articles I’ve been reading. It’s astonishing, isn’t it? She’s quite fashionable. All kinds of people are buzzing about her because she’s taken on Charlotte Perkins Gilman over this motherhood-versus-jobs issue. Gilman has always argued that women should be out in the workforce. She has been a major spokeswoman for the suffrage movement for a very long time. But Ellen Key is suddenly the new darling of the literati.”
“And we did it?”
“We must have. How else would they know about her?”
“Then why are book sales so bad? I paid Ralph Seymour good money to publish them, and I haven’t gotten a dime back.”
“Well, maybe the masses didn’t purchase Morality of Woman or Love and Ethics. But the magazine writers did. At least her ideas are getting exposure. It’s what we set out to do, and it’s happening.”
“I think that calls for some kind of toast.”
“I’d gladly celebrate if I weren’t so appalled by this essay.”
“You don’t need to agree with her on everything.”
“No. But I’m perplexed. Ellen came into my life when I was at the bottom of a well, and she threw a rope down to m
e. Ever since, all I’ve wanted to do is get her books into the hands of American women. This essay, though…it’s Ellen’s romantic eugenics in florid bloom. She paints a picture of women in a hundred years as fully realized personalities who want nothing more than to be breeder hens of a superior race. I’m almost embarrassed to send it out to anyone.”
Frank sighed. “But Ellen Key is not you. You are not Ellen Key. You are her translator. You can decide to take it or leave it, but you can’t censor her. I say, let the chips fall where they may.”
Mamah shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s ironic that Ellen has never been married or had children, yet she feels free to expound upon motherhood. I think that’s rather arrogant.”
“Bad trait, arrogance.” He wore a wry smile as he whittled at another pencil.
“Look at the fine time Ellen’s having being a famous intellectual. She dines with heads of state. Corresponds with some of the most famous people in the world. She mourns her bad luck in love because it kept her from having babies. But my goodness. She’s had a rather glorious career for herself—a career she wouldn’t have had if she’d been the kind of full-time mother she glorifies.”
“You sound almost angry at her.”
THAT NIGHT, lying in bed, Mamah wondered how she had managed to turn a deaf ear to what Hedwig had told her about Ellen. She had heard it, then filed it away somewhere in her mind. It disturbed her to think that she’d done that.
Frank’s remark about her being merely Ellen’s translator had stirred Mamah, too. Had her own identity gotten all tangled up in Ellen’s? She was such a powerful force. Ellen Key had a mind like a honed steel ax. It would be hard to argue with her about the damage this article might do in the United States, just at a moment when factions in the Woman Movement were putting aside differences to unite for the vote. For years before she met Frank, Mamah had been a passionate suffrage supporter. She wondered what had happened to that young woman.
Back in her study, she closed the Swedish version of The Misuse of Woman’s Strength. Maybe she would drag her heels on translating it. Maybe she’d even tell Ellen no editor wanted it. She searched the bookshelves, looking for a place to put it, and ended up setting the booklet on its side—not quite put away.
Outside, the sun had burned away the gray clouds. Through the icicles glittering like wet crystals, the sky had turned blue as a robin’s egg. Mamah thought she saw a white shape move among the frozen grasses in the field. It was probably a hare, foraging for bark or twigs or buds on branches. Frank had said hares turned completely white in winter to conceal themselves from predators. But they had to come out for food.
Mamah took down her field glasses from the bookshelf, put on her boots and coat, and hurried out into the snow. Slipping, nearly skating, down the icy driveway, she stopped once to look back. Taliesin’s fringe of icicles glinted. Oh, it felt grand to be out in the air. When she went back to the house, she would bring Frank out to show him how his “shining brow” was shining.
She headed into the field, breaking the icy crust with each step, then sinking to her knees in snow. She walked head down, the field glasses swinging from her neck. When she looked up to get her bearings, her face met the sun. In that moment her pupils contracted from the blazing light. She could see only throbbing waves of white. No clear outline appeared as she looked back at the house. Nothing distinct anywhere, really. She couldn’t even see her feet. You fool, she thought, laughing out loud. Knee-deep and snow-blind.
She closed her eyes and waited for it to pass.
CHAPTER 41
Near the end of April, spring pushed out through stiff branches and spiked up from the mud. Tiny green fists unfurled themselves. Mamah hoped against hope that spring wouldn’t suck in its fragrance and retreat.
Seed catalogs had arrived in February. When the few packets she’d ordered appeared in mid-March with the mail, she planted the seeds in coffee tins and arranged them along the south-facing windows in her study.
Whenever she and Frank got a moment together throughout February and March, they talked about planting. Frank hovered over his own catalogs of plum and apple tree varieties. “This Yellow Transparent here?” Frank said once. “We called it the ‘harvest apple’ when I was a kid, because it ripens during wheat-threshing time.” He was off then, recounting memories of the pies his aunts had made during harvest, and of the migrant threshers who ate them.
Planting fever was not new to Mamah. Even in the Berlin boardinghouse, without a square foot of her own dirt, she had entertained herself by imagining what she’d pick if she had but one choice. She’d settled on a Japanese peony she’d seen in a book, the kind with heart-stopping white flowers that had a fragrance straight from heaven.
Now the plant dreaming was on a colossal scale—thirty-one acres to think of, including an orchard and a vineyard. Then there was the terraced garden that rose to the hilltop, where Frank had encircled two majestic oaks with a low limestone wall, creating a sloping hill garden and the “tea circle.” Along with these, there were planting beds scattered all around the house.
Frank had consulted with his friend Jens Jensen about the orchard and vineyard. He trusted the list of apple trees and grape varieties Jensen suggested, and added his own favorites. But Mamah had her own authorities—Gertrude Jekyll, the English plantswoman, chief among them. Mamah knew Jensen’s prairie-style landscaping, even admired it. But grasses didn’t make her heart thump the way roses did. As more catalogs arrived, she became giddy reading about county-fair first-place winners.
“Aren’t these little striped carnations adorable?” she said in a moment of surrender. She pointed to a watercolor picture on the cover of a catalog.
“Freaks,” he said.
“But hollyhocks might look handsome standing against the stucco,” she ventured.
He gritted his teeth as if he’d backed into thorns. “I don’t like foundation plantings.”
She shifted in her seat and took another tack. “I know, but hollyhocks are architectural, really. Big plants give a garden form, like wonderful pieces of sculpture. Gertrude Jekyll uses them a lot.”
He didn’t respond. She knew what he wanted. Plants in the native vernacular. From the beginning he’d said that Taliesin should be all of a piece. That the woods, the fields, the orchard and garden and house should be one seamless, continuous cloth.
“It’s not that I just want sumac all over the place,” he said, “but—”
“But the detail expresses the whole. I know that. Don’t you think I understand after all this time?”
“There are design considerations.”
“Have I no taste? I once hired you, you know.”
He ran a hand through his hair.
“I think you’re just afraid to cede control,” she said.
He looked crestfallen. “I built this place for you, Mamah.”
“Then think of your client, my dear. She is a woman who has seen England in summer. I don’t understand why we can’t have flowers and prairie grasses.” Mamah got up and embraced him. “Does everything have to be exactly right? Can’t we play? Can’t I make a few mistakes while I’m figuring things out?”
He allowed a smile. “Nothing pink. And limit the foreigners, will you?”
“Reds and yellows would be gorgeous.”
“You’re the gardener,” he said, heading into the studio.
MAMAH THOUGHT ABOUT the planting beds from every angle. She watched the changing light on the hill leading up to the tea circle. She pondered the catalog descriptions, struggling to hold in her mind at one time the flowers, foliage, and berries of various plants. Poring over Frank’s plans for the whole of Taliesin, she made her own diagrams of flower beds and seasons, trying to create progressive waves of color.
Overwhelmed, she ended up picking old favorites and some she didn’t know a thing about. She chose phlox Coquelicot—twelve of them—because its flower was the color of orange poppies; then she picked another three varieties as much
for their names as for their colors, hoping Fraülein G. von Lassburg would bring out the best in General von Heutsze. She ordered twenty rugosa roses, twenty mock oranges, ten snowball viburnums with white ruffled flowers the size of plates. Multipes of flowering plants were added, mostly in hues of red and orange.
She thought she had ordered too much until she saw Frank’s orchard list. Two hundred and eighty-five apple trees in twelve varieties, not to mention twenty each of plum and pear trees, three hundred gooseberries, two hundred blackberries, and a hundred and seventy-five raspberries, plus two hundred currant and grape plants for the vineyard. Her eyebrows went up. “Did a drunken sailor with a taste for pies fill out this form?”
“We’re laying the foundation,” he said. “It means self-sufficiency.” There was impatience in his voice. “Anyway, Jensen gets these things cheap. They’re just little saplings, and if we don’t plant them now…”
He looked over her choices, then added twenty sumac trees to the list.
FRANK MENTIONED one afternoon in the middle of May that the plants were due in a day or two. He’d hired a couple of trucks to bring the shipment over from the Spring Green train station when it arrived, and they would need extra hands to unload.
“There are two boys over at the Barton place,” Josiah offered.
“Do you know them?” she asked.
“Nice family,” Josiah said. “Boys’ll be in school till afternoon. But I’d get ’em over here now to start digging holes.”
“Will you arrange it?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Josiah went to make the phone call from the kitchen.
“Tell them I will come to pick up the boys tomorrow,” she whispered as he was calling.
“I can get them,” he said.
“Thank you, Josiah, but I’ll go.”
Mamah had observed the little farmstead every time she drove along County Road C. It was like almost every other country farmhouse in the area—a whitewashed clapboard house with a swatch of cut grass in front of it, a barn, a windbreak to the north, and fields of crops that ran right up to the yard. She remembered the first time she’d taken real notice of this one. Driving past, she had caught sight of a small girl balanced over the top rung of the white fence, dangling a string toward a cat below her. A few feet away, rabbit skins were stretched out on the fence, drying.