He didn"t come to her, didn"t take her hand or put his arm around her or smooth her hair away from her face-he just kept pacing, and the question, the question of love, then and now, went unanswered. All at once the room seemed to shrink, dwindling before her eyes. She felt as if she were in a prison cell, and who was the jailer? He was. Frank was. "She"s vengeful," he said, "that"s all. A spurned woman-and she was the one who left me, let me remind you . . . But we"ve got to get you out of here, which is why I telephoned to your brother."
"My brother?"
"It"s all arranged. First thing in the morning, hours before Miriam or her spies are even out of bed, we"re taking you to the train-on a stretcher, if need be. I"ve reserved a compartment for us, and Vlada41 will meet us at the other end, in New York."
And so, like thieves, like refugees, like cowards, they stole away in the dark.
At some unfathomable hour a pair of orderlies appeared with a stretcher, as promised, along with the nurse Frank had engaged to look after the baby. Olgivanna remembered waking to the shuffling of feet and the sudden glare of the lamp at her bedside. And to Frank. He was leaning over her, rumpled and worn from a night spent dozing in the straight-backed chair in the corner, and Svetlana was there too, standing awkwardly in the doorway with her suitcase and a new toy, looking somber. Or frightened, she looked frightened, the poor thing, uprooted yet again. Olgivanna held out her arms. "Darling, come here," she whispered, her own voice sounding strange in her ears. Svetlana hesitated. She was going to be difficult, Olgivanna could see that. She patted the bed beside her. "Come on. It"s all right."
"Olya, it"s getting late," Frank said.
"Come on, Svet-it"s only me. I"m fine. I"m going to be fine. Don"t worry." Still nothing. "Do you not want to see your baby sister?"
"No."
And somehow, there she was-p.u.s.s.y-enfolded in the nurse"s arms, and who was this woman, this girl, thin-lipped and slouching, to whom Frank had entrusted their daughter? "Give her to me," she demanded, and the girl looked to Frank and Frank nodded, and her daughter, already setting up a thin wail of distress, was handed over like a parcel from the grocery. "You see?" she said, holding up the baby for Svetlana. "You see how tiny she is? Her little fingers and toes? She is going to need her big sister to look after her-do you not want to look after her?"
"No."
From Frank: "Olya."
"We are going to Uncle Vlada, honey, for Christmas. Christmas in New York-will that not be charming?"
She knew her daughter. Knew her moods. The answer to this and all other questions posed at this hour in this place would be exclusively negative. The child didn"t even bother to respond. She just clamped her lips and looked away. Frank stepped in then and began giving orders-he was good at that-and the nurse took Iovanna back from her and the men helped her onto the stretcher and the corridor yawned and narrowed before her. There was the elevator, the night rearing over her, a breath of air that was like a taste of heaven compared to the medicated aridity of the hospital, and then they were at the station and in their compartment and Svetlana came to her to lay her head on her shoulder for a good cry and at some point the car lurched and they were moving, moving again.
For Frank"s part, there was no turning back. Olya wasn"t well-you didn"t have to be a medical man to see that. She was a young woman, younger than either of his daughters, and yet as she lay there in the shifting compartment, the baby and Svetlana asleep beside her, he had a glimpse of the way she would look as the years fragmented and fell away, and it startled him. The softness had gone out of her face, replaced by the rigidity you saw in the very old, the faintest lines tracing the hard angles of her face, her color faded, her hair thin and l.u.s.terless. She was anemic. She was exhausted. Frightened. Upset. He"d been talking to her in a low voice over the rattle of the rails, trying to keep her spirits up as the baby fidgeted and Svetlana cried herself to sleep, but finally he realized she"d drifted off, her breathing harsh and catarrhal, a single globe of moisture caught like a jewel in her right nostril.
He felt a stab of guilt.42 This was a mess and no two ways about it. He should never have moved her into Taliesin-not till Miriam"s hash was settled. He knew better. Knew from hard experience, and yet what had experience taught him? Nothing. He saw what he wanted and he took it. That was his nature. That was his right. And here she was, the object of his desire, pale and wasted and with a thin stripe of saliva painted across her cheek, wedged into a narrow railway berth with two needy children-a child herself-and no place to call home.
There was a sudden flurry of conversation in the pa.s.sage outside the door-a man"s voice, a woman"s, fraught with venereal undertones and the giddiness of travel-and when they"d pa.s.sed, he glanced back at Olgivanna and felt a kind of impatience rising in him. What was the matter with her? Was she somehow frailer than he"d imagined? He didn"t remember Kitty"s birthings as being as hard as this-and she bore him six children.43 But he was exhausted himself. The wheels clattered on the tracks and he felt his stomach sink. He realized he hadn"t eaten since the night before. He checked his watch. It was quarter past nine in the morning, the train rolling through open countryside now, and though things were desperate, things were terrible and getting worse, the sight of the neat farmhouses and the solid red barns with their quilts of hay and the firewood stacked outside the kitchen door cheered him. He thought he would get up and fetch the nurse to come look after the baby and then make his way to the dining car to put something on his stomach, eggs and flapjacks, a slice of ham, gravy, fried potatoes, but he lingered, watching over Olgivanna and the children as they drew in air and expelled it, one breath after another, in the soft descending rhythms of sleep.
What he hadn"t told her, not yet, was that they couldn"t go home to Taliesin, even after their exile at her brother"s, because Miriam was on the attack like some sort of turbaned and bejeweled Harpy flapping through the air with her claws drawn and her jaws flung open in an otherworldly shriek of outrage, no quarter given or expected. Each day it was something new. She wasn"t content to hara.s.s a sick woman from her hospital bed. Oh, no, not Miriam. She went straight to the immigration authorities and compounded the mischief by filing a complaint to have Olgivanna deported as an undesirable alien. The affidavit named Olga as a foreign national who had come to Taliesin-to her home, Miriam"s home-under false pretexts, masquerading as a servant when in fact she was her husband"s "sweet-heart." His inamorata. His wh.o.r.e.
He felt his heart clench with hate. All he could think of was Miriam, how he"d let her come into his life when his guard was down, how foolish he"d been, how weak and deluded. His mood soured. The farms began to look uglier, less tidy, in need of paint and upkeep. For a long while he watched them loom and vanish amidst the barren skeletons of the trees and the frozen bogs and the shrubs dead to their roots. And he didn"t get up for breakfast or for coffee or the nurse or anything else, but just sat there till the fields ran continuous and everything beyond the windows became a blur.
If the journey was a trial, arriving was worse. Queens was grim, a regular horror of a place, and Vlada"s apartment grimmer. But no official came knocking at the door, no agent from Immigration or newspaperman or spy of Miriam"s, and after the first few days Frank began to relax his guard. His lawyers had instructed him to lie low for a period, to travel, keep out of sight until matters could be arranged with the immigration authorities and the divorce negotiations concluded, and here he was, in exile in Queens, New York, frustrated and angry-and what was worse, Olgivanna showed no sign of improvement. She wasn"t eating. Her brow seemed warm to the touch. The baby clung to her, colicky and restive, draining her of what little vitality she had, and Svetlana threw one tantrum after another. And her skin-it was so pale it frightened him. All he could think of was the hide of a dogfish he"d once seen preserved in a jar of formalin, bleached round its folds and grinning its grin of death.
And talk of boxes within boxes: the rooms were close, stifling. They stank of whatever Vlada"s wife was continually boiling up in a battered pot in the kitchen, borscht or bozbash or whatever it was, and it maddened him. Just to get away, to get out of the hermetic box of the apartment and do something-breathe, walk, think-he found himself taking the train into Manhattan each day with Vlada and wandering the streets, sketching, or slipping into the public library to write up his impressions of the city, all the while shielding his face with his scarf and wide-brimmed hat, striving for anonymity.44 It was Vlada who suggested Puerto Rico. Olgivanna needed warmth, sun, the clean white sand and endless horizon-and Florida wouldn"t do. They could still track her down in Florida, but in Puerto Rico no one would know them, no one would care. Even better: Puerto Rico was an American protectorate and you didn"t need a pa.s.sport to travel there. Vlada made the arrangements. Pa.s.sage for two adults and two children-Mr. and Mrs. Frank Richardson and family-out of New York bound for San Juan. They were moving again-and he"d never acquired his sea legs, sick in his stomach all the way down, sicker than Olya-but each hour of each day the winter fell away behind them and the sun rose higher in the sky.
They put up at the Coamo Inn,45 which featured hot-sulfur springs and endless plates of beans and rice and platanos graced with a skewer of marinated goat or pork, they bathed in the mornings and took long drives in the afternoons, and each day he joked and paraded up and down the patio in his bathing costume, keeping up the pretense that this was just what Olgivanna needed. Was she improving? Not visibly. Not that he could see. He hired a woman to look after the baby, had their meals brought to them in their rooms, read aloud to her and Svetlana at night. It was restful, almost like a vacation. But it wasn"t a vacation, it was exile, and they both knew it.
Beneath the shimmering surface, beneath the glaze of the banana plants, the primavera aflame with blood-red blooms and the nocturnal perfume of the jasmine, the place was corrupt in the way of the tropics, deeply wanting, a reverse image of Wisconsin. At night the mosquitoes descended like a black rain. There were open sewers. Emaciated dogs skulked in the shadows and roaches the size of field mice clung to the ceilings and clattered beneath the bed. "We are living like the Gypsies, Frank," Olgivanna kept telling him, something harsh in her tone he"d never registered before, the tan on her cheeks like rouge on a corpse, her limbs thin as the stalks of sugarcane greening in the fields, "and I cannot have one degree of peace until I am home where I belong. And Svetlana-what of Svetlana? She must have a proper life. She must have schooling-you can see that. And this is no country for her. It is a poor place. It saddens me to have to be here and see these degraded people in their rags."
"This is their home," he countered, though he privately agreed with her. If only Puerto Rico could exist, like a kind of paradise, without the people. "This is the only thing they know."
Her voice was thick, a lashing of blunted consonants. "Yes, but I do not want to know it."
They lasted a month. On the final day, the day before they booked pa.s.sage to New York and from there to Chicago, Madison and Spring Green, come what may, he was on his way back from the plaza when he was startled to see a man on horseback leaning forward to shout something unintelligible into the low cas.e.m.e.nt windows of the hotel kitchen. He was very dark-skinned, this man-almost black-and for one crashing irremediable moment the image of Carleton46 came into his mind, Carleton as he would have been in middle age, and he pulled up short. There was a rising fecal odor. A pair of electric-green dragonflies settled in a puddle and chased away again. The man"s horse rocked in place, so twisted and starved it was like the ghost of a horse, its eyes vacant and its coat dulled with the dust of travel, and he saw now that the man had something cradled in one arm-a chicken bound up in a sc.r.a.p of torn red cloth. "Gallina," the man was shouting, "se vende una gallina. Muy barata."
There was the sound of clattering pans from the kitchen. No one responded.
If it hadn"t been for the light, the way it etched the geometry of the near wall and sliced into the angles of the outbuilding as if to create something new altogether, something fluid and independent of concrete block and stucco, something created entirely by the sun in that moment, he would have moved on-he was in a hurry, arrangements to be made, suitcases to be packed, lawyers to be consulted and retained by wire and some sort of lunch served up for Olya and Svet-but he stayed, fascinated by the play of movement and shadow and the strangeness of the scene. It was then that one of the waiters from the hotel came hurtling out the door and began berating the man in a high strained voice. The man immediately slumped over in the saddle as if he"d been punched in the stomach. "Barata," he pleaded. "Barata."
"What is it?" Frank said, addressing the waiter. "What does he want?"
The waiter was a round-faced man in a white jacket, sweating t.i.tanically round his soiled collar, and he"d been sweating since they arrived and would go on sweating after they"d left. "It"s nothing, Don Frank," he said, giving an elaborate shrug. "He comes down from the mountains, that is all"-and he pointed a finger over the red-tiled roof to the hazy crags of the central cordillera, at least ten miles distant. Another shrug. He gave the man on horseback an embittered look. "To sell this chicken that has less meat on its bones than a pigeon, a sparrow even."
"But why? Why would he come all this way just to sell one chicken?"
Both men fixed their eyes on him now.
"Because he has nothing. Because he needs the money."
Suddenly he felt very dense. He stood there in the glare of the sun, picturing the one-room shack thrown together without benefit of blueprints, without nails or hammers or any tool but a worn machete, the porous roof, the rude furniture, no electricity, no water, no gla.s.s for the solitary window and not a single object of beauty anywhere in sight. "Tell him I will buy his chicken," he said.
"You? What do you want with it?"
"Just tell him."
The money was exchanged, a few coins, the man"s hand fluttering delicately against his own. And then he had the thing in his grasp, the rag over its eyes, the feel of the withered reptilian feet against his knuckles-a pitiful thing, a runt, half the size of one of Taliesin"s birds-and immediately he tried to give it back, thrusting the warm bundle up across the sweated neck of the horse, but the man wouldn"t take it. He just held up his spanned fingers and open palm, then nodded and turned the horse back down the road.
Early the next morning, before the sun had climbed up out of the sea to cut away the shadows and illuminate the shanties in the hills, Frank took Olgivanna and the children and caught the boat for home.
So she had to endure another trip, reverse logic, running to instead of from, the sea mutating from a fragile turquoise to verdigris to a deep metallic gray as they steamed back into winter, Svetlana pestering her with her interminable questions-"Where"re we going, Mama? Uncle Vlada"s? Where"re we now, do you think? Can I have a sweet? "-and then the thundering headache of the steel wheels pounding over the icebound rails all the way to Spring Green, Wisconsin, the Richardsons peregrinating as if it were their profession. Or fate. There was the car at the station. The familiar road. The river, the bridge, the lake. The long penstroke of the walls and the flourish of the roofs. Were they home? Were they really home?47 At first she felt relief, the interior opening up to her with its familiar smells-bra.s.s polish, the wax Frank used on the woodwork, linseed oil, the sourness of the ash spread cold across the stones of the hearth all this time and a lingering hint of the charred remains beneath the floors-her bed, her things, the kitchen and its promise of homemade meals and bread and cakes and cookies, cookies like the ones she"d baked with Dione, Sylvia and n.o.bu, but by the time she rose the next morning, she could feel nothing but the heaviness of the place. Mrs. Taggertz reappeared to do the cooking; a skeleton staff moped round the corridors. They were burning green wood. Everything was out of place. She wanted to get up and take charge, but she was weak and ill and all the color seemed to have gone out of the world. And Frank-he wasn"t himself either, stealing around like a burglar in his own house, peering out the windows as if he expected a cordon of sheriffs, marshals and federal agents to come marching up the drive at any moment. What good were the windows, what good were the views, when all they did was make you feel naked?
"You can"t be seen," Frank told her the day after they"d arrived, "not till this is settled," and immediately went off to consult with his lawyers.
Then there came a morning in April when the sun edged up over the southern flank of the house to warm the stones of the courtyard and she moved a chair outside to sit beneath the awakening oaks and read to Svetlana. If her daughter couldn"t go to school-if she had to be kept out of sight too-then at least Olgivanna was determined to educate her in her own way. Each day there would be dance, art, music, readings from the great books in Frank"s library-the American poets, Wilhelm Meister, The Man Without a Country, Victor Hugo"s Notre-Dame de Paris-both of them improving their command of the spoken and written language. And Svetlana was very good about it, an angel-she really did seem to want to learn. Or maybe she was just bored, and who could blame her? She felt the tension too-they were all waiting for something indefinable, a point of release that seemed as if it would never come.
The housekeeper had just brought them each a cup of hot chocolate. The gra.s.s was greening on the hill behind them and there were birds everywhere, their chirrups and catcalls dampening the eternal thump of construction from the far end of the house. Frank was down there somewhere, his shirtsleeves rolled up, banging away with Billy Weston and the others. She handed the book to Svetlana. "Now you read-here-the last stanza."
" "This is the poem of the air," " Svetlana began in a soft aspirated voice, " "Slowly in silent syllables recorded; / This is the secret of despair. / Long in its-" "
"Yes," she said. "Go on."
But Svetlana was no longer looking at the page. She was staring over her mother"s shoulder, her tongue caught in the corner of her mouth. Olgivanna turned to see a stranger with an oversized satchel striding up the drive as if he"d been invited, as if he belonged here, and her first thought was that he must be one of Frank"s lawyers, but what lawyer would wear a pair of trousers as tight as a high school soph.o.m.ore"s? Or a polka-dot vest? Or go without a hat?
"Olga," he called out in a voice meant to be hearty and winning, a booster"s voice, his lips giving shape to an automatic smile, his right hand flapping over one shoulder in a simulacrum of greeting. Before she could rise from the chair, he was on them. "No need to get up"-he winked, shrugged, tugged at his sleeves-"I won"t be a minute."
She set down the teacup. Her hands went to her hair. And what was he-a salesman? A curiosity seeker? And how did he know her name?
It all became clear in the next moment. He was digging into his satchel like some sort of deranged postman and she could see that he was trembling, his hands shaking, a twitch settling into his shoulders, until finally he produced a bundle of newspapers and laid them in her lap.
"Name"s Wallace, from the Trib. You"ve seen these?"
She looked to her daughter, but Svetlana gave her nothing. She could feel the color rise to her face, hot blood burning there with her shame, because that was what it was-shame. The newspapers bore dates from November through December-DEPORT OLGA? IT CANNOT BE DONE, WRIGHT a.s.sERTS-and then there was a more recent one, from February, the leaf turned down to a quarter-page photograph of herself, in a silk gown and her platinum filigree earrings and looking away from the lens as if she had something to hide, and under it the legend: ACCUSED. And, in smaller type: Olga Milanoff, to Whom Mrs. Frank Wright Charges Husband Fled.
Frank had kept the papers from her. They would only upset her, he said. It was nothing, he said. It would blow over. It was nothing. When there she was, for all the world to see. And gloat over. Like some freak in a sideshow.
"What we want," the man was saying, "is your side of the story."
WRIGHT FLEES TO DODGE U.S. LAW, SAYS WIFE. Claims Architect Is with Russian Danseuse.
He was chewing gum, his teeth working round the remnants of his smile. "Do you have anything to say? For the record?"
CHAPTER 6 : MIRIAM AT THE GATES.
The windows were flung open wide to the sun, the curtains bowing with the sweet breeze coming in off the lake, and Miriam felt very settled, very content, as she sat at the escritoire the hotel had provided for her, writing. In the past week she"d gone through nearly a hundred sheets of fine mouldmade kid-finish paper, with deckled edges and matching envelopes, and had just that morning called down to the stationer"s to place her order for another hundred, these to be embossed with her initials: MMNW, Maude Miriam Noel Wright. Twice now she"d had to get up to rub hand creme over the second joint of her middle finger, where a callus had begun to develop as if she were some sort of grind, a nail-bitten secretary or bloodless law clerk who never saw the light of day, but she felt strong and her hand barely trembled over the paper. She"d had breakfast sent up to the room-coffee and a bun, nothing more-and then allowed the pravaz to take the tension out of her shoulders and free her hands for the day"s work.
She was writing letters-angry, slanderous, denunciatory letters-and addressing them to anyone she could think of who might take an interest in her situation. She wrote to her husband"s creditors, to the Bank of Wisconsin and all his clients-past, present and prospective-to the newspapers, her lawyers, and to him, most of all to him. He was a scoundrel, a fraud, that was what she wanted the world to know, and she would be d.a.m.ned if she would live out of a suitcase like a-a carpetbagger-while he paraded around in luxury with his danseuse. Her bill had been owing now for more than two months and the people at the desk had begun to give her insolent looks-and that she should have to endure such looks, she, his lawful wife, was unconscionable. Especially in light of the fact that the Dane County Superior Court had ordered him to pay her attorneys" fees and per diem expenses while the divorce was being contested and he most emphatically was not living up to his end of the bargain. What"s more, she wrote, she was being threatened with eviction if the account wasn"t settled, and where would she go then?
She was in the middle of an urgent plea to the governor of Wisconsin, weighing a question of diction (should she use the term "blackguard" to describe her husband or did it sound too antiquated?; she wanted to call him a "heel," because that was what he was, a heel and a son of a b.i.t.c.h, but then women of her cla.s.s didn"t stoop to such language, not in letters to the governor, at any rate) when the telephone rang.
Her attorney, Mr. Fake, was on the other end of the line. "Mrs. Wright, is that you?" He had a low, considered voice, deeply intimate, as if he"d been born to collusion.
"Yes," she returned, "I"m here," and she couldn"t help adding a note of asperity. "And I"m doing as well as can be expected under the circ.u.mstances. The looks I"m getting-"
"Well, that"s why I"m calling. There"s been no movement on their side, none at all, we"re just simply deadlocked, and I think I may have a solution for you-"
She held her breath. This was what she wanted to hear-tactics, movement, action, her forces gathering for the a.s.sault. "Yes?" she said.
"There is simply no reason I can think of for you to have to continue living hand to mouth in some hotel when Taliesin remains community property. Taliesin is your rightful and legal home and I really do believe that if you were to move back in-"
"Move back?" She was incensed at the thought of it, all those pastures reeking of dung, the dreary vistas opening up to yet more pastures mounded with dung, the yokels, the insects.
"What I"m trying to say is that it might just force the issue."
"But he"s there. With her."
"Precisely."
All at once the image of Taliesin rose before her in such immediacy she might have been staring at a photograph. That yellow place on the hill-or of the hill, as Frank would say with all the pomposity of his ladies-of-the-club tones-that palace, that monument to himself. Oh, the idea warmed her. Taliesin wasn"t his to do with as he pleased-it belonged to both of them. Equally. That was what community property meant, the very definition of it. And if she"d been willing to allow him the use of it till the fair value of the estate was ascertained and they could make an equitable division of property, now she saw what a fool she"d been. How dare he try to exclude her when his prize breeding b.i.t.c.h was installed there, living in all the luxury he could afford her, sleeping in their bed, in their bedroom, commanding the place like some sort of upstart queen out of a Shakespeare play, Lady Macbeth herself?
"All right," she said, crossing her legs and leaning forward to reach for a cigarette, "and how do you propose I go about it?"
A pause. Then the soft creeping tones, as smooth as kid leather: "Well, I"ve been thinking that you just might want to consider announcing a press conference."
They all gathered in the lobby like dogs early the next morning, dutiful dogs with their teeth sharpened and a smell of the meat wagon on the air, and she held herself erect, struggled briefly with her face-with her mouth and chin and the emotion welling up like a geyser there because this was her life, her very life she was fighting for-and let them all know how Frank Lloyd Wright had betrayed and abused her and how he was living in defiance of a court order with his foreign concubine in the house that was as much hers as his and how she was facing eviction from her modest rooms even as she stood there before them. "If my husband continues to defraud me, and I"m sorry to put it in such strong terms, but that"s what it amounts to"-she"d meant to pause here for dramatic effect, but now, in the heat of the moment, she rushed on instead-"I"m afraid I"ll have no resort but to sell off my jewelry, the prints we collected together in j.a.pan, the jade necklace and earrings given to me as a keepsake by Baron kura48 himself, my screens and shawls and the little inlaid rosewood tables that are practically the only things I have left of my home-just to pay my bills, my own meager upkeep, while he spares himself nothing."
Her eyes were luminous, moist. She couldn"t seem to feel her feet, though she must have been standing on them. She had a sudden vivid recollection of her school days, Mrs. Thompson"s elocution cla.s.s, the air sleepy with the scent of magnolia and she driving home her point about Tennyson"s use of the heroic simile with such force that the entire cla.s.s came back to life and Margaret Holloway, the most popular girl in the school, gave her a look of such undisguised admiration from the second row left that the glow of the moment had stayed with her all these years. "I don"t know," she said finally, steadying herself, "that I won"t be thrown out into the street." But was this the moment for the photograph? Yes, and she posed for the flash before delivering the kicker:49 that she was left with no choice but to return to her rightful home-and that she intended to do so that very day.
"Mrs. Wright!" a reporter sang out, and she turned her eyes to him, a thin man in a gray suit with liverish eyes and hair that faded away from his brow in a pale blond crescent. "Can you give us some idea of your itinerary? "
They watched her, these hounds of the press, ravenous, while she put a hand to her bosom and let a little Southern mola.s.ses acc.u.mulate in the lower reaches of her voice, on familiar ground now, the lady in distress-and she was in distress, she was, and they ought to recognize it, the self-serving sons of b.i.t.c.hes. "Oh, I just don"t know. I really am all but indigent, I"m afraid." And then the little dig she couldn"t suppress: "My husband may be able to afford a fine motor or the price of a first-cla.s.s rail ticket, but I really am just as poor as a church mouse."
Five minutes later, as Mr. Jackson led her to the elevator (Mr. Fake had had to excuse himself-he was in court that morning), the reporter caught up with her. "Pardon me, ma"am," he said, nodding to Mr. Jackson, and she was thinking only of her pravaz, her nerves thoroughly jangled by the strain of the whole business, "but I was struck by what you had to say back there-you"ve had a pretty punk deal and no two ways about it-and I wondered if I might be able to help?"
She paused to take a good look at him, his jacket open now to reveal a fawn vest stippled with polka dots, the tight trousers hiked up over his glaring tan boots, and how old was he-twenty-five, thirty? Mr. Jackson didn"t say a word. Mr. Jackson was a friend of the press, a very good friend. She decided to be bemused. "And how do you propose to do that?"
"Well, listen-I"m Wallace, of the Trib? Mr. Jackson can vouch for me"-another nod for Jackson, which Jackson accepted and returned with an almost imperceptible dip of his chin-"and it just happens that me and my wife were planning on driving up to Baraboo this morning because her mother"s been having trouble with her feet and we"d be pleased if you"d-"
"Sure," Jackson said. "I don"t see why not." He was staring at her now, calculating, and she didn"t especially like the look he was giving her. "What do you think, Mrs. Wright? It might be interesting if this fellow and his wife were able to help you out here, don"t you think?"
"That"s right," the reporter said. "Myra and I"d be more than happy to do anything we could. And Mr. Jackson can vouch for me, right, Harold? "
At least it was a sedan. At least there was that. The reporter drove, and his wife-pregnant with twins, it seemed, or maybe it was triplets-sat beside Miriam in the backseat while another man from the newspaper, whose name flew in and out of her head three or four times in the course of the morning and well into the afternoon, sat up front. He was the photographer, or so she gathered, and that was the only thing of significance about him. The roads, of course, were execrable, and the motorcar"s coils or springs or whatever they were didn"t seem to function in any capacity whatever so that for the entire drive she was thrown from one end of the seat to the other like a rag doll, and the wife-Myra-had to cling to her to keep from being flung out the window herself. Conversation was glacial. They pa.s.sed through two thunderstorms, stopped twice at filling stations, once for sandwiches in Madison and once in the G.o.dforsaken precincts of Mazomanie, where she felt an urgent need to visit the washroom.
All four of them got out of the car there-the pretense of Baraboo, if that was what it was, had long since been abandoned: they"d gone west out of Madison on a road she knew all too well and no one had a said a word about the presumptive mother and her podiatric crisis-and the two men had a good stretch and made a show of examining the tires while she and Myra used the facilities at the railroad depot. A bra.s.s plaque on the wall inside the door of the depot informed her that the village had been named for an Indian chief whose name, when translated into English, meant "Iron That Walks." There were three people in the waiting room, one of whom-a farmwife in a kerchief-seemed to have some sort of animal partially concealed in a wicker basket at her feet.
Miriam insisted that Myra use the facilities first-what a nightmare it must have been to be pregnant in that place, in that heat, in that car-and she stood there staring at the wall for what seemed an eternity while she listened to the trickle of water behind the closed door. It was June. Hot. Muggy. The season of bugs. And they were everywhere, crawling up the walls, clinging to the ceiling, beating round the ticket window as if it were the only place in the world they could breathe and exude their fluids and scramble atop one another so they could produce yet more bugs. In the distance-and maybe it was over Taliesin itself-there was a peal of thunder.
When it was Miriam"s turn, she locked the door behind her, lit a cigarette and immediately extracted her kit from her purse. She needed something-but not too much, not her usual dose, just a modic.u.m-to quiet her nerves. They were close now, no more than fifteen miles or so, and the thought of confronting Frank made her stomach sink. In one corner of her mind she saw him falling on his knees to beg her forgiveness, wooing her all over again, just the way it was in the beginning when he would have died for the touch of her, the lamps and candles lit and everything aglow with the presence of fine art and fine minds too, the little Russian sent packing, booted out the back door with her bags and her babies while the lord and lady of the house made tempestuous love to the keening of violins on the victrola-or to jazz, the jazz she adored and he was indifferent to. But in another corner-a corner that grew disproportionately till it filled all the rapidly expanding s.p.a.ce inside her skull with pulsing clouds of color, the red of hate, the green of envy-she knew she would fly at him the minute she stepped through the door. She would . . . she would . . . She looked down and saw that her hands were clenched and the pravaz still lodged in her thigh, the skin uplifted round a single bright spot of blood.
The remainder of the journey was something of a fog. There was a side trip to Dodgeville, the county seat, to file the writs Mr. Jackson had arranged for in advance-a peace warrant for Frank, and just so she wouldn"t feel left out, one for his little Russian on a morals complaint. She might have called the justice of the peace by the wrong name and she seemed to recall something about a dog, but it was all inconsequential: she"d filed the complaints and the sheriff had been summoned to see them acted upon. The road curved and dipped and curved again. There seemed to be geese, ducks and chickens everywhere. Things flapped at the windows. The engine droned.
The conversation picked up as they got closer to Taliesin, that much she remembered, both men trying to get a rise out of her with questions about what she meant to do once they arrived and how she felt about her husband and about this dancer usurping her place, and one of them-the photographer, she thought it was-producing a flask of what he called "good Canadian whiskey"50 to take the edge off. "Here"s to Dutch courage," somebody said, and the flask went round the car, the alcohol lodging like sand in her throat, and why was she so dry all of a sudden when everything around her was silvered and shimmering with the wet of the storm that blew over them in a burst and released the skies to a shattering sunstruck explosion of grace and eternal light? Why was that? And why did everything seem so much denser and richer than she"d ever imagined so that when the river flashed beneath them and the long low golden walls suddenly appeared as if they"d created themselves in that moment, just by her imagining them, she felt nothing but loss?
"Here," she said, "here, turn left. Now right. There, that"s the gate there."
What was odd-and it struck her immediately-was the confluence of automobiles collected at the gate, three, four, five of them, and a group of men in shabby suits stationed beside them. To a man, they wore their hats c.o.c.ked back on their heads and to a man they were watching the progress of the sedan out of narrowed reptilian eyes, unmoving, unflinching, and she would have thought they were statues but for the faint blue traces of smoke rising from their cigarettes and cigars. It came to her then that these were newspapermen, gathered there to doc.u.ment her grand entrance-and that Mr. Jackson must have put them up to it. Publicity, that was his byword. And Mr. Fake"s too. Let the press do the work for us and you"ll see your husband come around smart enough. Her hands went to her hair, tucking the loose strands of it up under her green velvet turban, and as the car slowed to pull in at the gate she was busy with her compact and a fresh application of powder and lipstick.
Only then did she look up. The gate, which normally stood open, had been pulled shut and barred with a conspicuous padlock she"d never seen before. Standing there in front of it was Billy Weston and two of the other smirking inbred local morons who would have starved to death a generation ago if Frank hadn"t paid them to hang about the place and look busy. She saw the trouble in Billy"s eyes when she stepped out of the car and the reporters all snapped to attention as if they"d been reanimated, flinging down their cigarettes and converging on her in unison.
The shoulder of the road was a mora.s.s of dirty brown puddles-country life, how she hated it, and what had she been thinking?-and immediately her right heel sank into the soft earth so that she staggered momentarily before bracing herself against the fender. The reporters watched her with flat eyes, but none of them offered her a hand. The sun was in her face. She felt a finger of sweat trace the ridge of her spine. She took a moment to freeze them all with a sweeping look, then marched up to the gate.
"You, Billy Weston," she snapped, "open this gate at once." She"d been debating whether or not to cry out What is the meaning of this? in tones of high dudgeon, but there was no point: the meaning was clear. Frank-and his henchmen, these village idiots with their open collars, battered hats and filthy trousers-intended to keep her out.
From Billy Weston (a thin gawky man, so gray and pedestrian he was barely there at all, his eyes blunted and his mouth set): "I"m sorry, Mrs. Noel, but Mr. Wright says to admit no one."
"The name is Mrs. Wright, as you know perfectly well-Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright-and I live here. This is my house, not yours. Or his. Now you open this gate and be quick about it."
No reaction. He exchanged a glance with the other two, but that was the extent of it.
"Have you gone deaf? I said, open this gate. At once!"
Suddenly she seemed to have her hands on the cool iron panels and she was jerking the gate back and forth to the grinding accompaniment of its hinges and to h.e.l.l with her gloves, to h.e.l.l with everything. "Frank!" she screamed, focusing all her attention on the inert face of the house rising up out of the hill above the dark sheen of the lake. "I know you"re in there! Frank! Frank!"
It was useless. She was over-exerting herself. She could feel her heart going and the sweat starting up on her brow beneath the tight grip of her turban. This was what he"d wanted, the scheming b.a.s.t.a.r.d-he"d planned it this way, to humiliate her. Well, two could play at that game.
She let loose of the gate as suddenly as she"d taken hold of it, wheeled round on the reporters and saw the look of awe flickering from face to face as the puddles reproduced miniature portraits of the sky, and the moths and bees and gra.s.shoppers sailed across the field in bright streamers of color. "Boys," she said, addressing them all even as she threw her shoulders back and stalked to the sedan, "where I come from we like to say there"s more than one way to skin a cat. If he thinks he can keep us out of here, he"s sorely mistaken." She brushed by Wallace, who was just standing there watching her with his mouth agape, as if he were at a baseball game or a hypnotist"s ball, and threw back the door of the car herself. "Come on now, what are you waiting for!" she cried, and if she was flailing her arm like some soapbox preacher, well, so what? These were her troops, she saw that now, her men-at-arms, ready to storm the place at her command, and the thought exhilarated her. "Get in your cars, everybody. We"re going up the back road-and see if they can stop us!"