by T. C. Boyle
102 William Cary Wright (1825-1904). Said to be one of the most charming and charismatic men of his time, who unfortunately proved to be too unreliable, too footloose and casual about earning a living to suit Wrieto-San’s mother. Anna divorced him and wrapped herself instead in the enfolding arms of her family, the Lloyd Joneses of the rich farmlands of Wisconsin’s Wyoming Valley. Wrieto-San was seventeen at the time. Shortly thereafter he changed his middle name from “Lincoln” to “Lloyd.”
103 I’m sorry, but no matter what O’Flaherty-San might say about sexual adhesion, this seems to me another of those suicidal leaps into oblivion Wrieto-San was repeatedly making. Certainly he must have known that the community—and the press—would universally condemn him for establishing a second mistress in the place of the first, as if he had learned little from the tragic consequences. Or worse: as if he cared less.
104 Even in old age, Anna Lloyd Jones Wright was an imposing woman, five feet eight and a half inches tall, a height to which her celebrated son could never quite rise, despite his elevated heels. It was she who decided on his profession while he was still in the cradle and she who made him her okāsan ko.
105 This was the famous Steinway, which had lost its legs when hauled through a window to spare it from the 1914 conflagration. Ever resourceful, Wrieto-San had adapted drafting stools as temporary supports.
106 Ultimately, Miriam would be tapped in this regard, contributing several thousand dollars of her own money to the reconstruction effort, a fact to which Mr. Fake would one day be intimately attuned.
107 Mildly put. As I’ve indicated, Wrieto-San’s temper was a force all its own, incendiary, savage, excoriating, and all the worse for the caustic bite of his tongue.
108 At that time a young architect by the name of Russell Williamson. I have no record of his remuneration, but I suspect he worked for his bed and supper alone, prototype of the apprentices to come.
109 Then still living in Chicago prior to her husband’s retirement from the stock exchange and their move to a more equitable climate on the West Coast. Cf. page 285.
110 The Mann Act, passed into law just five years earlier as a means of prosecuting pimps, panders, fancy men and macquereau who transported women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution, would haunt Wrieto-San, as has been seen. Its intention was to combat the very real abuses of “white slavery,” in which young immigrant girls were approached with offers of employment (in many cases as they stepped off the boat from Ellis Island), only to find themselves opiated, locked away in a room and gang-raped, starved and brutalized till all sense of dignity and individuality was destroyed, after which they were sold into prostitution. Mrs. Breen must have been among the first to attempt to use the law as a tool of harassment and intimidation.
111 A strange adumbration of what lay in the future. One can only speculate as to the extent this experience may have influenced Miriam’s decision to report Olgivanna to the immigration authorities some ten years later on the same pretext.
112 Wrieto-San had been blessed with acute eyesight. However, according to his autobiography, he felt himself rapidly aging in the wake of the tragedy of August 1914 and acquired eyeglasses. I rarely saw him wear them, and never in public, a matter of personal vanity with him.
113 Despite his lifelong protestations to the contrary, I can’t imagine but that Wrieto-San for the most part welcomed publicity, as it got his name out before the public and fed his sense of self-importance. So too with Miriam. Perhaps—and this occurs to me just now—they chose each other in a flare of mutual flamboyance, each reflecting all the brighter off the other.
114 Surname and provenance unknown. Perhaps he was the lover to whom Miriam would refer darkly when speaking of her “tragic love,” perhaps even the very one she accosted with a drawn knife. See page 86n.
115 O’Flaherty-San may be thinking here of The Wild Pampas (Boston: Lippincott, 1915) by H. (Harriet) R. R. Fleck, one of Miriam’s favorite novelists.
116 We can’t know for certain, but it seems likely that he was then working on the plans for his revolutionary “American System Ready-Cut” standardized houses—what today would be called, in classic American shorthandese, pre-fab.
117 Public sympathy turned against her at this juncture, and Wrieto-San was able to take the high road in declining to prosecute her for misappropriation of the mails. Still, the damage to his reputation was done and he was once again seen as philandering and venal, if not faintly ridiculous.
118 Kosode, that is. Lightweight summer robes. Wrieto-San collected textiles as well as prints, screens, sculpture and pottery. Anything of the Far East seemed to hold a special fascination for him, most particularly, as has been seen, the art of Japan. Do I flatter myself to say that our folk art is the equal of any nation’s?
119 Aisaku Hayashi had been sent by the Ōkura investment group (and the Emperor, who was providing sixty percent of the funding) to make a close study of Wrieto-San, whose reputation of working against the grain, not to mention providing regular scandals for the tabloids, bore examination before any contract for the new Imperial Hotel could be finalized.
120 A sign of beauty in my country. O’Flaherty-San’s wife, my granddaughter Noriko, has just such a dentition and a smile of rare and melting grace.
121 An unfair characterization, needless to say. My own late wife, Setsuko (née Takata), whom, sadly, O’Flaherty-San never met, was the very soul of the perfect mate, highly accomplished as a violinist, graphic designer and homemaker, graceful, intelligent, beautiful, my partner and equal in every endeavor. I shall miss her through all my days with an ache as deep and wide as the gulf that separates this life from the next.
122 A crude gaijin notion that is beneath contempt, nothing more nor less than an attempt to belittle and dehumanize our people, a process that began with Commodore Perry and continues to this day. Would Miriam have stooped so low as to promulgate it? Sadly, in the derangement of her anger, I am afraid so. Which excuses nothing. (An editor wants to strike it, but we shall let it stand for the sake of realism. And O’Flaherty-San.)
123 1916.
124 In 1905. Wrieto-San credits this trip with awakening his lifelong love for all things Japanese.
125 Some two thousand concrete “fingers,” as he styled them.
126 It was demolished in 1968.
127 Wrieto-San was one of the foremost collectors in the world. As has been seen, he made use of his prints as a kind of currency, playing them off against his debts. He realized some $10,000 on the sale of prints just prior to leaving for Japan at the end of this year of 1917, and he was rapidly investing these monies in acquiring a far grander and more extensive collection than anyone in the United States had heretofore seen.
128 Arata Endo is, of course, the illustrious Japanese architect who went on to design the Minamisawa building of Jiyu Gakuen and the Koshien Hotel, among other prominent buildings. He became Wrieto-San’s good friend and close associate and was invaluable as a liaison between Wrieto-San—who did tend to be somewhat imperious, to say the least—and the investors’ group. Without him, I doubt very much that Wrieto-San, for all his charisma, would have survived the thousand misunderstandings and cost overruns the construction ultimately entailed.
129 That would be Aline Barnsdall. Her residence, as any architectural buff will know, would come to be called Hollyhock House, after the flowers that grew on the hillside.
130 In all, they made five trips to Japan between 1917 and 1922, staying for a total of thirty-four months. Sadly, the fifth trip marked the last time Wrieto-San would ever again set foot on our soil.
131 Again, the ironies of Wrieto-San’s life and attachments seem strangely cosmic, almost surreal, this Olga prefiguring the Olga who would become Miriam’s bête noire some five years later.
132 Literally, “Please, do you have room, sleep, bath?”
133 Wrieto-San’s mother was eighty-one when she came to Tokyo, where she was revered by everyone who came into
contact with her. In Japan, unlike America, we honor the old for the passage of their years and the diachronic luxury of their thoughts. They are living artifacts and they are people, not abandoned husks to be shunted off to the purgatory of nursing home and hospice.
134 In the summer of 1922. They left Japan in July and were at Taliesin by mid-August.
135 But did she want it, truly? As for Wrieto-San’s mother, her health fell off rapidly through that autumn and she died in a nursing home in the town of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, in February of the following year, when Wrieto-San and Miriam were in Los Angeles. By all accounts, he did not return for the funeral.
136 I was in school in Washington at the time, but my parents had returned to Japan, so the reverberations of the great Kantō earthquake shook the ground beneath my feet nonetheless. All communications were down. Rumors ran wild. I don’t think I slept for a week—impotent, terrified for my reverend parents and my countrymen too. Estimates of the dead ran to 150,000 as the fires reduced the city to cinders. When finally my father’s telegram arrived—their apartment had been spared; they were both uninjured—I went out in a daze to sit by the Potomac and sob into my two cupped hands, living vessel of my relief.
137 There has been a continuing controversy among scholars over the authenticity of this telegram, any number of whom question its provenance, claiming on the evidence that Wrieto-San himself composed it and contrived to have it sent to him from Spring Green rather than Tokyo, as a kind of rhetorical feather in his cap. Both O’Flaherty-San and I reject these claims. In any case, the telegram’s sentiments are incontrovertible and the proof of it was the fact that when the dust cleared the Imperial stood proud and undamaged while all of Tokyo lay in ruins at its feet. Or, rather, its foundations.
138 Pronounced Maymah, though, of course, the associations with the softer, more elemental “Mama” would be irresistible to a Freudian, given Wrieto-San’s deeper needs. And what was, inevitably, to come.
139 From An Autobiography: “The architect absorbed the father in me . . . because I never got used to the word nor the idea of being one . . . I hated the sound of the word papa.” It’s not for me to comment, but if only I could hear that sound from my own son’s lips just once more I would give everything I have.
140 Ellen Karolina Sofia Key, 1849-1926. Swedish feminist, writer, educator, radical. Author of such titles as Love and Marriage (1911) and The Woman Movement (1912). Mamah was her acolyte, and, later, her translator. A typical passage from Love and Marriage reads as follows: “Just as alchemy became chemistry and astrology led to astronomy, it is possible that such a reading of signs might prepare the way for what we may call . . . erotoplastics: the doctrine of love as a consciously formative art, instead of a blind instinct of procreation.”
141 An astonishing figure, comparable to some $6,500, adjusted for inflation, in 1979 dollars. Both O’Flaherty-San and I have verified the amount from public records, as Wrieto-San was perennially being sued for payment. He once said to me, rather grandly, I think, given the contretemps over the Bearcat, that if one saw first to the luxuries, the necessities would take care of themselves.
142 The George C. Stewart house, 1909.
143 Invented name. History does not reveal to us the actual identity of the unfortunate woman, though a trip to Boulder, Colorado, and a search of the hospital records there might have produced it. Of course, we are comfortable here in Nagoya, O’Flaherty-San and I, and we strive only for a closely invested brand of verisimilitude. Cf. Albert Bleutick, page 23n.
144 Call it Roaring Fork Mines and imagine that he got out—or at least diversified—before the collapse of 1893.
145 Wrieto-San’s behavior in this regard can hardly be viewed as anything less than irresponsible, perhaps even criminal. He seemed always to assume an adversarial relationship with his clients, for whom he felt he had to cheapen himself in some essential way simply to have the means to practice his art, and so if he were to “burn” them, as the saying goes, with cost overruns and advances upon advances, he felt it was only his due. Needless to say, he was abandoning these people and the projects he had no intention of completing except by proxy. What is the expression—take the money and run?
146 As rendered by Katsushika Hokusai, 1760-1849, from his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Wrieto-San possessed at least one premier example, Fuji from Honganji Temple in Asakusa, Edo.
147 An eerie adumbration of what Olgivanna would one day face. Cf. page 97.
148 The full panel, inscribed in three-inch-high letters beneath the motto, reads: Good Friend, Around These Hearth-Stones Speak No Evil of Any Creature. In his early years, devoted nineteenth-century aesthete that he was, Wrieto-San was enamored of such aphoristic expressions, as well as antiquated decorative touches like the classical frieze in the entry hall. He soon abandoned them for the cleaner, modern style he pioneered. Which, needless to say, required no verbal amplification.
149 This is, of course, one of Wrieto-San’s most celebrated early designs, added to his residence in 1893 to accommodate his growing brood. It is an impressive, grand space, with its high, barrel-vaulted ceiling, a fireplace surround of Roman brick and brick wainscoting that carries into the window embrasures. I imagine a hearty fire burning in the hearth as a symbolic backdrop to the first Mrs. Wright’s travail.
150 Press conferences. One wonders when they were first conceived of—and wonders too at Wrieto-San’s curious propensity to inflict them carelessly on the women he professed to love.
151 Lloyd Wright, 1890-1978, eventually became an adept and celebrated architect himself, despite having to work in the shadow of his father. He collaborated on and oversaw a number of Wrieto-San’s projects, including Hollyhock House, and designed a great many buildings independently, among the most admired of which are the Samuel-Novarro House in the Hollywood Hills and the Wayfarers Chapel in Palos Verdes, California. If we apprentices often felt the burden of Wrieto-San’s mastery, I can only imagine how heavy that burden must have been for his firstborn son. But then, genius is never light of weight, is it?
152 W.E. Martin, brother of Darwin, who was one of Wrieto-San’s foremost patrons and patsies. Scandalized, Martin’s wife refused to ride with them, and Martin took the back streets, hoping no one would recognize him. Wrieto-San, however, with his hair down to his collar and dressed like “the man on the Quaker Oats package” in knee breeches and drover’s hat, caused a commotion on the platform, crying out in a stentorian voice for his luggage and shouting, “All aboard, all the way to Oak Park by auto!” No skulking for Wrieto-San, no shuffling or pulling a long face—he was the returning hero. Always.
153 Louis H. Sullivan, the great Chicago architect, for whom Wrieto-San worked as a draftsman from 1888 to 1893, after which he was fired for designing homes on a freelance basis (though Wrieto-San, in typical proprietary mode, claims that he quit). At any rate, he was a keen borrower, as has been seen, but at the same time seemed to have difficulty with the concept of repayment.
154 Francis W. Wrieto-San borrowed $10,000 from him to finance his trip to Germany, leaving the bulk of his ukiyo-e collection with him as collateral. He’d built a house for Little in 1902 and Little would become one of his few repeat clients, hiring him to build Northome on Lake Minnetonka, the Minnesota lake that would later provide the scene for Wrieto-San’s arrest in the company of Olgivanna. Wheels within wheels.
155 Edwin was suing for divorce on grounds of desertion. State law prescribed a two-year absence before the divorce could become final. Since Kitty refused to grant Wrieto-San a divorce on any grounds, Mamah must have felt she had no choice but to remain behind in Europe, far from the prying eyes of the American press. But far from her lover too. And her children. And her life.
156 We had a talker among the apprentices in the mid-thirties, a man just out of college by the name of Ken Milligan. He talked so compulsively—and distractingly—that Wrieto-San insisted he work alone. One morning, Wrieto-San appeared on the site with a
local plasterer, who happened to be deaf, and, in his sly way, singled out Ken to work with him. Three days later Ken came into dinner, looked up from his plate and announced to the table at large, “You know, I don’t think that new guy understands a word I say—what is he, a Polack or something?”
157 Years later, Billy confided to me that he had no idea why they’d hired him, unless it was for his tools. “I think they were short,” he said, “and I had everything from my father—braces, bitstops, augers, chisels, drawknives and spokeshaves, planes, squares, bevels, every kind of saw ever made—plus what I’d been collecting over the years on one job or another. I guess I was tool-rich and they were tool-poor.”
158 This brings to mind the story of one of the many civil cases in which Wrieto-San was involved. The judge asked him his profession and he stated that he was an architect—in fact, the world’s greatest architect. “The greatest?” the judge echoed. “How can you make that claim?” “Well, Your Honor,” Wrieto-San replied, “I am under oath.”
159 This is a feminist text, a gloss on Ibsen and his female characters. Women, Ibsen felt—certain liberated women, at any rate—were less regimented by society and more a natural force than men. Of course, while we make no claims here to be feminists or sociologists or anything of the like, I can say that Daisy Hartnett was certainly a natural force, and I too much constrained by expectation—and by Wrieto-San—to fully grasp it. Oh, Daisy. Daisy, Daisy, Daisy. Where are your creamy white thighs and your butterfly mouth now?