The Women

by T. C. Boyle

  When she was satisfied, she sent Mrs. Dunleavy to the pantry for newspaper and then she meticulously restacked the logs atop a crosshatch of kindling, and this time, when she held a match to it, the fire took. Almost immediately the smoke began to clear and both women edged closer to the fire to warm themselves. “You’re all dirt, ma’am,” Mrs. Dunleavy said, but Olgivanna didn’t hear her. She stood there, feeding the flames and warming her hands, her hair come loose from the frugal bun into which she’d twisted it that morning, her face smudged and hands blackened. They would be eating chicken for dinner that night, roasted, and chicken in a ragout for the next week, because something had got into the hen-house, a sleek killer of the night that killed for the pleasure of it, for the love of chaos, and left the corpses behind. The pipes had frozen in the main bathroom. The generator had given out and she’d sent Billy Weston to see about it, and so they’d be dining by candlelight. And what else? A tree was down across the back road and she didn’t know what they would do for eggs in the morning. But it was nothing, nothing to her, and she took it all in stride. She was in charge now, just as she’d been at Fontainebleau with Georgei, but there she was just one of Georgei’s disciples, one of his women. Here she was a wife.

  Frank needn’t bother with any of it, and that was her pride. Increasingly, in any case, he was away from home, lecturing to make ends meet. He’d been in Chicago all week, delivering a lecture at the Art Institute and doing his best to attract commissions along the way, and he was due home any minute now—she could picture the car winding up the hill and pulling into the driveway, the wheels glittering in the weak winter light, the headlamps radiant—and she told herself she should clean up, put on a fresh dress, comb out her hair, but there was the laundry still and then the bread and dinner after that and a thousand other things. As it turned out, she was so busy she never even heard the car. She was in the kitchen, seeing to the bread while Mrs. Taggertz basted the chicken and the girls played in the bedroom. Everything was still, dusk coming down, the only sounds the rhythmic swish of Mrs. Taggertz’s basting brush and the steady purr of the fire in the stove.

  Then Frank was there, striding into the kitchen in his hat, coat and scarf, bringing the scent of the outdoors with him and all the fierce joy of his uncontainable energy—Frank, Frank Lloyd Wright, the genius of her life—and he stooped to brush her cheek with a kiss though there was a smudge of soot on the flange of her nose and another on her chin like the beginnings of a beard, and he was talking, already talking, bursting with the immeasurable tale of his drive up and the people at the lecture in Chicago and how he was certain, one hundred percent certain, that he had a commission for a new building there and that he’d heard from Darwin Martin and his cousin Richard and both of them were committed to the designs he’d presented them and the money would be there soon, soon, soon. His arms were laden with packages. A gift for her, gifts for the girls and for himself, a statue he couldn’t resist, for the Blue Loggia. “And this,” he said, handing it to her quickly because the girls had heard the car and here they were hurtling into the room to leap round him and sing out his name, and what was it, a newspaper? “There’s something here for you,” he said, and in the next moment he was gone, the girls spinning in his wake.

  She took her time, setting the gift-wrapped box and the newspaper aside till she was finished with the task at hand—the bread had to be timed to Mrs. Taggertz’s schedule and she had to get Herbert in to set the table for eleven, or no, twelve tonight. The windows darkened. Steam rose from the pot of potatoes on the stove. She could smell the chicken browning as she shaped and braided the loaves and set the pan in the oven. Then she sat at the kitchen table to unwrap the gift he’d given her—it was a piece of jewelry, very simple, a single opal teardrop on a gold chain. She reached up to fasten it around her neck and felt the grit there from the chimney, thinking she’d have to draw a bath after dinner, and that would involve stoking the steam boiler in the cellar and yet more wood for fuel. Finally, she took up the newspaper, expecting another article about Frank, a review of one of his lectures or the announcement of an honor bestowed on him. He’d folded back the page and marked it with an asterisk. She moved the candle closer.

  It wasn’t what she’d thought. What she was reading—and she had to catch her breath with the sudden shock of it—was an obituary. Maude Miriam Noel had passed away in Milwaukee two days earlier after slipping into a coma following an intestinal operation. She was sixty-one. Fifteen years ago, the article read, when she first figured on the front pages of American newspapers, she was a striking beauty with russet hair and hazel eyes—a talented sculptress cherishing honors won in the art circles of Paris. And now? Now she was dead. Her estate, consisting of her personal effects and a $7,000 judgment against her ex-husband, Frank Lloyd Wright, was bequeathed to a friend of her youth, Mrs. Leora Caruthers of Santa Monica, California. Miriam’s three children, with whom she’d fallen out, were left one dollar each. Services were to be held in Milwaukee.

  For a long moment, Olgivanna stared down at the newspaper before her, smoothing it over and over again while the candle guttered and Mrs. Taggertz moved vaguely on the periphery, shifting things atop the stove. She told herself she felt nothing. Or almost nothing. Relief, she supposed, but not triumph and certainly not regret or even sympathy. A strangeness, just that, as if the world had gone away a moment and then come rushing back in all its immediacy. She was just about to rise from the chair and see to the bread—she could smell it suddenly, the hot layered scent of it expanding through the room till it overwhelmed everything, even the chicken—when all at once the lights flickered and came on again. Without thinking, she leaned forward and blew out the candle, then got up to take the loaves out of the oven.

  PART II

  MIRIAM

  INTRODUCTION TO PART II

  In the second year of the Fellowship, tuition rose from $675 to $1,100—a sixty-three percent increase—and I wrote my father for additional funds and my father indulged me. By this time, I was so thoroughly committed to the Fellowship, to Taliesin and to Wrieto-San himself I couldn’t have imagined any other way of life—if my father hadn’t come through I think I would have gone out and robbed a bank in order to stay on. Truly. I do. It’s difficult to explain, but the fact of the matter is that in all eras, whether prosperous or constrained, people—especially young people, and I was young then, young and unfinished—want desperately to find their niche, believe in a vision, belong to something greater than themselves. I was no different. I lived and breathed Taliesin. The sun rose in the east and lingered overhead for no other reason than to illumine those golden walls. Winter, spring, summer, the year rushed by so precipitately it was as if the days were fanned by a breeze in one of those filmic sequences that play havoc with the calendar. Was it October again? I couldn’t believe it. None of us could.

  Though I’d been slim to begin with, I wound up losing eight pounds that first year. All the flaccidity of my student days was sweated out of me, sinew and muscle tautening in its place. My fingers were nicked and scarred, my thumbnail blackened with the errant thump of the hammer. I was tanned till my skin shone like a red Indian’s and I was as familiar with the teats of a cow and the grunts and odors of the pig wallow as if I’d been born with a stalk of grass between my front teeth and hayseed in my hair. And I could drive a nail, saw a board, split wood and plaster a wall as well as any man in the glorious state of Wisconsin. All this thanks to Wrieto-San’s hands-on approach and his ongoing impecuniosity that forced him to put his apprentices to work as a means of survival. Was it slave labor, as some have claimed? Perhaps. But there was a spirit of camaraderie, of all for one and one for all, that elevated our labors into the realm of the sublime, far above the reach of the carpers and critics, with their dwindling souls and limited imaginations. We were the acolytes, Wrieto-San was the Master. We lived to serve him.

  My father wrote me a six-page letter adducing his objections to Wrieto-San’s regime—which, wh
en distilled, amounted to a single rhetorical question: What was I doing milking cows and pitch-forking hay like a peasant in a hempen kosode and shit-caked geta when I should be designing buildings back home in Japan? He concluded with a proverb: Kappa mo kawa nagare (even a kappa—a water sprite—can get carried away by the river; i.e., anyone can make a mistake). With all respect to his paternal wisdom, not to mention the check he’d enclosed, I countered with Sumeba miyako (roughly: wherever you live, you come to love it). And I did love Taliesin as I’d never loved anything in my life, though I had to concede that I would have preferred a bit more time in the drafting room and a whole lot less at hard labor.

  At first, Wrieto-San had paid carpenters, stonemasons and farmhands from the surrounding villages at the rate of two dollars a day, plus meals, to carry forward the work on the Hillside School, which was then being converted to residences for the apprentices, as well as a theater and a new studio removed from the main house, but in this fourth year of the Depression, he’d had to let them go because he was, as always, flirting with bankruptcy. In fact, the only viable project on the boards at the time was the Willey house, and so, when we weren’t out in the fields or hammering away at Hillside, there was precious little to do in the drafting room but copy out Wrieto-San’s old designs by way of exercise and instruction.

  Typically, our days would begin with the six-thirty bell followed by breakfast at seven. We ate communally, but for Wrieto-San and Mrs. Wright, who took their meals in a private dining room attached to the larger one reserved for the apprentices, and though we sometimes lacked for meat there were eggs, flapjacks and enough oatmeal to ballast a ship of the line (Wrieto-San believed firmly in the virtues of oatmeal, both as the body’s fuel and its scouring pad). In later years, once Svetlana graduated from musical prodigy to impresario, breakfast would be followed by half an hour’s choral practice under her direction, but in the fall of 1933, we went straight to work. There was an afternoon break from twelve to one-thirty, then work till five and dinner at six. On Saturday evenings we were all required to dress for dinner, after which those amongst us with musical abilities—I was not one of them—would perform for the assembled apprentices, Wrieto-San and his family and any prospective clients or other guests who happened to be in attendance. Sunday-morning breakfast was the reward after a long six-day week, and here there would be preserves, bacon, ham, eggs, biscuits and pie, and then there was the formal Sunday dinner in the incomparable living room, and we were all able to bask in the fully realized expression of organic architecture at its apex. Ten o’clock was lights out, enforced by the shutting down of the hydroelectric plant.

  Of course, the rigors and isolation of country living weren’t for everyone, and a number of apprentices left after the first year, including four of the five women. The one who stayed, Esther Grunstein, an almost super-naturally homely girl of twenty-two or -three who favored sacklike dresses and who had oversized hands and a frizz of hair that made it seem as if she was wearing a bonnet even when she wasn’t, was rumored to be available to any of the men for a price arranged on a sliding scale according to her whim. She wouldn’t—and I had this from Herbert Mohl—“go all the way,” but she would perform what were called hand-jobs, and if she was in the mood and an apprentice had the money, fellatio. My relations with her were strictly collegial, I should say, though our isolation, combined with the fresh air and exercise, certainly kept the sap rising in us all and eventually, in extremis, even she began to look good to me. But then it was October and a squad of new apprentices made their appearance, suitcases and freshly drawn checks in hand, and we were all relieved to discover that there were four women among them. More significantly, one of those women was Daisy Hartnett.

  On the day Daisy arrived I was in the studio in the main house, working with Herbert and Wes and some of the others on the preliminary drawings for a newspaper plant in Oregon that would never be built, when the phone rang in Wrieto-San’s office. We could all hear the phone ringing quite plainly, just as we could hear every word Wrieto-San spoke into the mouthpiece as he wooed clients and begged off creditors, since his office was separated from the studio only by means of the high stone vault in which he kept his most precious Japanese prints. There was the click of the phone lifted from its cradle and then Wrieto-San’s mellifluous tenor singing over the fractured silence. “Who?” he said. “Apprentices? At the station, did you say?”

  In the next moment, Wrieto-San emerged, as he did a hundred times a day to work over our drawings, throw a log on the fire, seize on one or another of us to run an errand, fill a gap in the kitchen or trot out to the fields to refresh the wildflowers in the ranks of vases spread throughout the house. We all stood, as we did every time he entered the studio, no matter how deeply engaged we were in the work at hand. He went straight to my desk. “Tadashi,” he said, leaning in close with a fresh pencil in his hand, smelling of graphite and cedar shavings, “I’m going to need you to run down to the station and fetch two of the new apprentices. Just arrived.” He paused, looking from me to the drawing and back again. “The Stutz is in good working order, I trust?”

  “Yes, Wrieto-San,” I said, fumbling out of the chair to give him an abbreviated bow. “We’ve managed to repair the front fender where it, uh, and the tire too—”

  The car—Wrieto-San had never ceased his criticism of it—had been subjected to some fairly rough usage over the course of the past year, degenerating from the sporty road machine I’d plucked off the automobile lot to a harried and dilapidated farm vehicle. The front wheels were out of alignment, the tires patched so many times they were like patches themselves and the body seemed slowly to be taking on a new shape altogether. And the paint scheme was no longer pit-of-hell black and canary yellow, but rather a uniform Cherokee red. Cherokee red was Wrieto-San’s totemic color and he insisted that all his vehicles—all the vehicles at Taliesin, whether they were properly his or not—should be graced with this hue. An obliging garage man in Madison had done the trick for me, at my own expense, much to Wrieto-San’s satisfaction.

  He was already plying his eraser, making wholesale changes to the drawing I’d spent the entire morning on. He barely glanced up. “Two of them. Greiner and Hartnett, females.”

  I didn’t know what to expect and I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I wasn’t exactly shy—“reserved” is the word I would have chosen—but there was almost a hundred percent certainty (Greiner, Hartnett, females) that these women would be Caucasian, as was virtually everyone else in the lily-white state of Wisconsin. Not that Wrieto-San didn’t surround himself with an international set—the paid draftsmen we succeeded were from Japan, Poland, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia, and one of my fellow apprentices, Yen Liang, was Chinese—but the Fellowship was otherwise exclusively American. And these were American girls. And American girls generally observed the taboos against miscegenation. I knew this. We all knew this. What choice did I have but to be reserved?

  Unfortunately, it was raining. Hard. I could certainly have made a better impression in the Bearcat with the top down, but now we would be forced to wedge ourselves into the steaming interior, which smelled—again, unfortunately—as if the chickens had been roosting in it, and maybe they had. And then there was the problem of the front drive. Every time it rained its permeable surface was transformed into an Amazonian mire, and so it was now. Twice the rear wheels sank to the frame and I was forced to go back up to the house for a shovel to extricate them. By the time I reached the road my shoes were no longer shoes but slick glistening sculptures of varicolored mud, my jacket was soaked through and the cuffs of my trousers were as limp as the hides of two freshly skinned squirrels. I fought the clutch, rocketed through pit, puddle and chasm and pulled up in front of the station just over an hour after I’d left the drafting room.

  Dimly, through the slash of rain and the fogged-over windshield, I could make out two figures huddled on a bench under the eaves of the depot. Female figures. Blouses, hats, the swell of a fem
inine calf against the crease of a skirt. They were flanked by shadowy parcels, hatboxes, swollen suitcases—and a single steamer trunk the size of a grand piano. Neither of them moved. I shut down the engine and stepped gingerly into the street, which was awash in braided ripples of dun-colored water. The pounding of the rain flattened the hat to my head even as the outer layer of mud was prised from my shoes and carried on down the street in two black dissolving crescents.

  “Hello!” I called, wading through the gutter and springing up the steps, beaming like a department-store greeter in the Ginza. “Welcome to Spring Green!” I was feeling an excess of energy at this point—or nerves, call it nerves. “I wish we could have arranged better weather for you,” I added. Lamely.

  Both women, their faces vague and bloodless, gazed up at me warily from beneath the brims of their hats. One of them (Daisy, as it turned out) was smoking, hunched forward over the hump of her knees and the trailing wet skirts of her overcoat, brightening the flame at the tip of the cigarette with a long casual inhalation till the glow lit her face, and though she hadn’t planned it—she was merely smoking—the effect was theatrical. She wore a cloche hat with a stiff circular brim that masked her eyes and hid her hair, blond wisps of which were visible at the base of her neck as she bent to the cigarette. Her legs, what I could glimpse of them, were sleek and shapely, but sturdy too. I could see in an instant that she had hara, a quality that is often translated into English as “spirit” or “heart” (as in “she really has heart”), but in fact refers to the stomach, which we believe to be the true center of one’s body and the gateway to the soul. My mother, in her time, was possessed of great hara. As was my father, though, sadly, the afflictions of the war seemed to have taken it from him.