"There"s one more thing," she began, and they all fell silent. She fed on that silence and took a long slow look round her, feeling supreme, joyous, on top of the world. A smile for them, for each and every one of them, and for the cameras too. "I just wanted to announce," she went on, and here that unfortunate little tickle began to play at the base of her neck and she brought a hand to her hair as if to smooth it back and held it there a moment till the tremor subsided. And yes, there was the flash, there it was. She laughed, actually laughed aloud, with the surprise of it.
"Yes, Miriam? Madame Noel? You said you were going to make an announcement? "
"Oh, yes, yes. I wanted to announce that I"ve taken a bungalow in Hollywood"-another pause, another slow pan of the room-"and at the suggestion of a number of prominent men in the motion-picture industry, I will be sitting for a screen test in the very near future."
There was a murmur of voices, the shuffling of feet. Somewhere off to her left someone was laughing or maybe crying, and outside, beyond the walls, she could hear the metallic clank of the streetcar and the dull fading rumble of the wheels carrying down the avenue. She didn"t know what else to say and so she smiled again and thanked them all for coming.
CHAPTER 9 : TALIESIN REDUX.
It was like a haunting, like a slow, steady descent into the lair of the demon-lover, no peace, no respite, a fresh horror at every turning, chaos without end. Each time she and Frank set up a household, whether at Taliesin, in Minneapolis or Phoenix or on the very farthest verge of the continent where the land gave out and the waves pounded the sh.o.r.e, Miriam was there to wreck it. Each time they left the house-to go for a walk, to the grocer"s, an exhibition, a restaurant-Olgivanna never knew if it would be there when they got back. Ash, that was what she"d come to expect. Scorched earth. Ruins. The sheriff would be at the door with yet another warrant. Immigration men would pop up out of nowhere. Bankers. Lawyers. The windows would be shattered and the furniture smashed and a policeman stationed on the porch with the Shunsh print propped against the rail like a bit of refuse flung up out of the maw of a hurricane. And what if this madwoman came at them with a knife? What if she tried to harm the children? What then?
She tried to ask Frank about it, but he just waved her off. "Miriam"s a very disturbed woman," he"d say, as if the p.r.o.nouncement itself would diminish her, neutralize her, take the edge off the blade, jam the bullet in the chamber.
"But you have said yourself that she has attacked people with a weapon, have you not?"
"There"s nothing to worry about," he would tell her, but she could see that he didn"t believe it. She found him checking the windows at night. He even began locking the doors.
Her cough worsened. She developed hives, allergies, a fungal infection. The sound of her own daughters" voices began to grate on her-their squabbling, their needs, Mama, Mama!-and the incessant suck and draw of the surf made her feel as if all the vitality were draining out of her in a pale rinse of foam. She couldn"t walk into a room of that cottage without seizing with dread and fear and hate, the tables gouged, the mark of the axe on the mantel, the walls, the baseboard. And though Frank was tender, responsive, unfailingly cheerful, whistling over a drawing or the pages of his ma.n.u.script, singing in the shower, doing a little dance round the icebox with a gla.s.s of milk in one hand and a sandwich in the other, there were times when she wanted to get up and batter him with her fists, scream till she was breathless. She wasn"t yet thirty years old and she felt as if she were sixty. She began to hate the way the sun came out of the east each morning. Everything tasted like nothing, like sand. Grit. Dirt in her mouth.
And then, just when things looked darkest, came a sea change. Miriam was charged with breaking and entering, in addition to vandalism and violating a prior restraining order. She was the one before the court now. She was the one with her photograph in the paper, the one shamed and publicly humiliated. And finally, at long last, the newspapers began to see her for what she was-an imbalanced and vindictive woman who would go to any lengths to destroy her ex-husband"s happiness-and they turned against her, just as Frank had said they would. "I"m not a dancer," Olgivanna had told them, and that had carried weight, certainly it had, but it was the revelation that Miriam had hounded her out of the hospital with her newborn child that truly aroused public sentiment. That portrait of the young mother hustled out the door on a stretcher while her infant clung to her breast and the sleet drove down out of the sky was all but biblical-she might have been Mary hiding the Christ child from Herod, and where, in the public eye, did that leave Miriam? And then their year of probation was up and Frank married her75 and gave her the present of Taliesin, rescued, at least for the time being, from the bankers.76 "We"re going home," he told her, "back to Taliesin. To stay."77 All the way across country, married now, legitimated, holding her happiness inside her like a rare and shining thing, in love with her husband and her children all over again, she could think of nothing but Taliesin. Her garden was two years dead, the livestock sold off at auction by the Bank of Wisconsin, the flowerbeds given up to weed. The house would be a mess, she knew that, damaged by the weather and neglect, perhaps even vandalized, but it was home and they would soon be there and that was all that mattered. Home. Taliesin. The house of the hill. She saw it when she closed her eyes at night, one scene after another shuffling in her head like cards in a deck, and it was there in the daytime too, solid, impregnable, while the countryside rolled by and all the towns and villages and farmhouses in the world vanished behind them in a swirl of fading specks. When the car finally turned into the drive and they came up the rise to the courtyard, she was so overcome she sprang out the door before it had rolled to a stop, running on ahead while Frank and Billy Weston fumbled with the luggage and the children shouted out, and here were the flagstones beneath her feet and there the overgrown garden and the sentinel oaks and the Chinese bell she"d longed to ring again-and she did ring it, jerking hard at the clapper to let the sound carry out over the countryside in all its annunciative fervor.
Inside, it was different, and she wasn"t prepared for it. She pushed open the door and the first thing she saw was a heap of rubble hastily swept against the wall-broken crockery, the shards of a vase, the spark of gla.s.s-and a rug rolled up in the corner and soaked through because of a leak in the wall above that was even now dripping, dripping. It was cold. Late October, the day lying soft as a glove over the hills, but in here, where no fire had been lit in a year and more, it was winter. And where was the wood for fuel? Unfelled, unchopped, unsawed, unsplit, unstacked. She wandered into the bedroom next, the girls" voices echoing behind her-"Mama, where are you? Oh, no, look at this! Mama, Mama!"-and saw that there were no bedclothes, no blankets, no pillows even. They"d stolen everything, the neighbors, the farmers, their upstanding, decent and G.o.d-fearing countrymen who could hardly wait till Frank"s back was turned to descend on the place. Thieves, that was what they were. Thieves and hypocrites.
She drifted through the rooms in a daze, shivering, defeated, and even Frank couldn"t warm her, though he sent Billy for wood and had him light the fires in the living room and bedroom and the boiler in the cellar. Things were smashed everywhere. They"d stolen the crockery, the silverware, tools, towels, the kitchen implements, Frank"s drafting set, his bow compa.s.ses and protractors and calipers and even the collection of colored pencils he"d been building for twenty years-and what one of them, what smirking farm boy or his whiskery hog-stinking father, could have any use for those pencils except spite? Except to show what they thought of Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright and his fancy dress and his manners and his mansion on the hill? It sickened her. There was the smell of urine in the corners, as if they"d marked their territory like animals. That was what their neighbors thought of them. That was what they were worth.
She might have let it conquer her-wreckage, everything wreckage, strewn from one end of the country to the other, as if they were living under an evil spell and condemned to act out their futility over and over again-but she didn"t. There had been a revolution, the worst had been done, and it hardened her.78 And hardened Frank too. Within the month the house was transformed, essential furnishings in place, the larder stocked, fresh-split oak acc.u.mulating, a pair of milk cows lowing in the barn and new faces appearing each day. Projects were coming in-a house for Frank"s cousin to be built in Oklahoma, a ma.s.sive twenty-three-story skysc.r.a.per in New York and a grand luxury hotel in the Arizona desert that would cost as much as three-quarters of a million dollars-and he needed draftsmen, architects, carpenters, clerical help. By Thanksgiving, Taliesin was alive again, all of them-even Svetlana-working so furiously there was hardly a moment for reflection.
They fell into a routine. While Frank spent his time in the studio or out amongst the men, giving orders, as exacting as the demiurge himself, all the rest was left to her, and that was a good thing, a vital thing, because it was work and work was what she"d done for Georgei and now she was doing it for Frank, for her husband. And herself. For herself too. And the children. And Taliesin, let it rise again. This was the time of seventeen-hour days. Up in the dark, to bed at nine in a numb, tumbling descent to the pillow. The smell of sawdust on the air, of linseed oil, paint. The strength coming back into her hands, her forearms, her wrists and shoulders. She scrubbed, plastered, painted, washed, kneaded, peeled and chopped. Ordered the supplies, oversaw the cook, drew up a rotating schedule of household ch.o.r.es for the draftsmen, prototypes of the apprentices to come, who had no choice but to pitch in lest the whole enterprise collapse around them. They might have worked in an office in Chicago or Milwaukee, might have lived with their parents or in an apartment with a whole world outside their door, might have taken their meals at a boardinghouse or cafeteria, but now they were here and it was one for all and all for one.
Winter settled in. The lake froze and Frank insisted on taking time out for a skating party. And then it snowed and they all went tobogganing. There was hot cocoa. A wienie roast. Porridge in the mornings and great cauldrons of soups and stews, heavy with cabbage, beans, rice and potatoes because meat was scarce on a farm that hadn"t been farmed, six, seven, eight loaves of bread a day, cookies, cakes, hot cider and pot after pot of coffee, so much coffee Olgivanna began to think they were floating the foundation on it. b.u.t.ter, cheese, eggs, flapjacks. Apples two years in the barrel. Cane syrup. Mola.s.ses. Sugar. They needed fuel for the body. They needed heat-above all, heat. Because for all its rare beauty, Taliesin was as frigid, drafty and ice-bound as a medieval mead hall. Innocent of central heating, reliant on individual fireplaces that half the time burned down to embers,79 its rooms open one onto the other and banks of single-pane windows wrapped round the entire structure, it was practical only as a dream made concrete and why, she kept wondering, couldn"t Frank and his ancestors have settled in the tropics? Bermuda or some such place. Florida. The Gulf Coast.
One afternoon she was in the kitchen with the cook and one of the draftsmen-a boy of twenty-three who"d come up from Chicago for the chance to work with Frank Lloyd Wright, a good boy with a ready smile and a croaking octave-splitting voice Frank liked to imitate when he took on the persona of Eeyore the donkey for p.u.s.s.y"s benefit. His name was Herbert Mohl. He had eyes the color of rainwater, hair so fair it was nearly translucent. He was peeling potatoes-had been peeling potatoes since he"d washed and dried the breakfast dishes-and the job got away from him, a dull job, a job no boy would choose or want. Every time she glanced up he was sitting there motionless, the peeler in one hand, an unscathed potato in the other. "Herbert," she said finally, glancing to the two tubs of potatoes-a bellying white mound in the one, a dirt-brown mountain in the other-"you know we"re going to need those potatoes for tonight, and then you"re on the wood detail and cleanup after that."
He gave her a long look, the potato clutched like a grenade in his hand. The light was dim, the windows gray. "You know what? I don"t care. I just don"t care anymore."
She was at the counter, on her feet, kneading the dough for tomorrow"s bread. Her feet ached. Her shoulders ached. Her nose was running and all morning she"d been surrept.i.tiously wiping it on the sleeve of her sweater. She wanted to say something soft, mollifying, she wanted to cajole, but she wasn"t very good at cajolery and she was in no mood for argument or even, at this point, conversation. "You"d better care," she said, "if you want to eat."
He rose from the stool so swiftly it startled her. "I"m an architect, not a scullery maid," he said, his face flushed. "I didn"t come here to peel potatoes and tend your precious fires and scrub pots and pans till my fingers go stiff. And what about pay? I"ve yet to see a single cent out of this place." He was verging on insolence and insolence she wouldn"t tolerate. Mrs. Taggertz, busy at the stove, stiffened. Money was a sore point with her too, and what was this, the Bolshevik revolution all over again? "Didn"t you ever think I might have needs-we might have needs, all of us, George, Cy, Henry?"
"Only just peel."
Predictably, he flung down the potato and the peeler with it. Then it was the ap.r.o.n and then he was at the door. "I"m sorry," he said, "but I didn"t sign on to be anybody"s slave. I"m going back to Chicago if I have to walk."
She looked to Mrs. Taggertz, but Mrs. Taggertz wouldn"t return her gaze. The woman had never been particularly forthcoming-she didn"t seem to have much to say to anyone, but then she hadn"t been hired for her ebullience but rather for her ability to stretch one pot of soup into two-and when she did make conversation it was almost always couched in the form of gossip critical of someone or something. She was of the neighborhood and the neighborhood didn"t approve of Frank Lloyd Wright. Or of Olgivanna either. Even if they were married now. "I cannot believe my ears," Olgivanna said, just to hear her own voice. She was furious, seething. How could this boy dare to speak to her like that? "Did you hear? Did you hear what he said to me?"
Only then, only because she was directly addressed, did Mrs. Taggertz look up. Her hands were busy-she was chopping onions with an easy effortless stroke, as if her arm worked on a hinge-and she paused to sc.r.a.pe the residue from the knife. "He never washes the dishes right, that one," she said, sc.r.a.ping. "And the silverware," she added, shaking her head. "Disgusting."
Olgivanna thought of going to Frank, but she couldn"t bring herself to bother him when he was working. It was up to her to manage affairs around the house, just as she"d done at Fontainebleau with Georgei, and she was determined to do it. Without thinking, she set the dough aside to rise and took up the potato peeler.
For the next hour, she kept replaying the confrontation in her head, thinking of what she should have said, how she should have been firm and yet yielding at the same time. Frank had particularly liked Herbert-he was a precise and unerring draftsman and an accomplished flautist who"d enlivened their musical evenings-and she"d liked him too, and now they would be a man short when there was so much work to be done. It was a shame and she could only blame herself. She"d been in a mood, but that was no excuse-she was in charge here and she should have demonstrated more self-control, more reserve, dignity. Never let anyone see what you"re thinking, that was what her mother had told her. And her mother was as fierce and commanding as any woman on this earth. Finally, when she"d finished with the potatoes, she went looking for him.
By then, it had begun to snow. She"d smelled the change on the air early that morning, a premonitory scent of moisture riding high overhead in the steadily unfolding clouds, and she felt it too as an expectant softness that seemed to envelop her as she threw feed to the chickens and loaded lengths of split oak into a wheelbarrow and hauled it across the yard to the house, her breath streaming before her. Now the snow was beading down, swift and tightly wound, with a hiss you could hear the minute you opened the door. Herbert wasn"t in his room and the fire there had burned out. The bed was made, but his clothes, his suitcase and the flute were gone. She felt a pulse of alarm: Had he really meant it? Was he that head-strong? That foolish? She slipped into her coat and went out to the courtyard to find his tracks there, a draftsman"s unerring line heading off down the drive and into the gauzy curtain of the storm. Already, they were filling in.
In her haste-she had to get him back before Frank found out, and that was all there was to it-she"d neglected hat and mittens both. She found a cotton scarf in the pocket of her coat and wrapped it round her head to protect her hair, which was wet already, wet the moment she darted out the door, and she knew she should have gone back for the mittens, but she was in too much of a hurry to bother. Twice she slipped and fell going down the drive, her bare hands stinging in the cold. The wind picked up and threw pellets of ice in her face. Herbert"s tracks grew fainter. No matter: she knew where he was going.
It was three and a half miles to the station at Spring Green. In optimal conditions, with her long purposive stride, it would have taken her just over an hour to reach it, but the snow was already ankle-deep and slick beneath with a thin transparent layer of ice and she had to pick her way carefully. The road was deserted before her. The hills swept round and plunged to the river, the faded image of the bridge plumbing a line to the far sh.o.r.e. Nothing was moving, nothing animate, but for the birds exploding from the bristled crowns of the trees that rocked in the wind with a frictive moan like the keening of the dead. Halfway there her cough came up on her and she had to lean against a fencepost to catch her breath, the snow sifting down around her, granulating in the folds of her coat, whitening the ends of the scarf and the frozen hem of her dress. Her nose was tender where she kept wiping it with the back of her hand. Both hands had gone numb. She couldn"t feel her feet.
Still, she pressed on, telling herself she was just out for a stroll, thinking of the girls-they were with the housekeeper, ostensibly entertaining themselves, and by now they would have begged to go out of doors to sled down the drive, and perhaps they would have come looking for her, for their mother, for permission and a.s.surances, and begun to wonder where she was. (Has anyone seen Mama? Svet would ask and she"d poke desultorily through the rooms, the kitchen, the living room, the loggia, the bedrooms, but she wouldn"t dare burst in on Frank-that was verboten-and in that moment she"d shrug it off and pull on her boots and mittens and go out to the stall where the sleds were kept.) She held that picture in her mind as the snow climbed across the fields and the landscape lost its features and everything strove for a cold white uniformity. She wasn"t lost. There was no chance she could be lost because she knew this road as well as any road in the world and that stand of trees ahead would have marked the edge of the Perry property and soon she"d see their farmhouse and smell the smoke of their chimney and then she"d be past it and the buildings of Spring Green would begin to define themselves against the burden of the snow. She kept on, feeling light-headed, feverish-was she catching cold, was that it?-and when she coughed she brought up a sputum the color of tapioca.
She found Herbert at the station, sitting huddled on a bench under the eaves of the depot. He was hugging his shoulders, the suitcase at his feet, the narrow leather tube of the flute case set atop it, gathering snow. She came up the street, trudging through the drifts, and kicked her way up the steps to him. "Herbert, what are you doing?" she demanded, impatient despite herself. "You"re not serious about this, are you?" She had a whole speech prepared about the essential contribution and integral value of each member of the Taliesin community and how much Mr. Wright depended on him and she too, she too depended on him, but the cough clawed at her throat and stole the air from her lungs.
"The station"s closed," he said, his voice a doleful drone against the wind. "There"s n.o.body here, no fire in the stove, nothing. I don"t know how they expect . . ." he trailed off. His eyes were liquid with emotion.
"I have come here all this way," she said, her own voice toneless and weak, drawn down the funnel of her cough. "In the snow," she added redundantly, waving an arm to encompa.s.s the dead street, the buried rails, the soft shifting backdrop of the storm. She was thinking of Georgei in that last winter when he broke up the coterie at Fontainebleau, of the way he"d thrown them all over with an indifferent shrug and how it had hurt her more than anything in her life. Under him they"d experienced something collectively no one of them could have experienced alone, a bond that transcended the physical and the knowable, a reason for being and waking and worshipping. Without him, they had nothing. She knew that. She felt the loss of it even now. And when she looked down at the boy shivering there on the bench, she knew she would never let go of it again. "I have come here," she repeated, and she was coughing into her fist, the refrigerated poison of the air scouring her lungs and the brittle pellets beating at her face, "to take you back."
There was Christmas at Taliesin that year, Frank as entranced with the season as the children, caroling and s...o...b..lling and tobogganing and even donning a false beard to impersonate Father Christmas, and then he packed up everything and everybody-including Herbert and Mrs. Taggertz and Billy Weston and his family80-and drove them out of winter and into the perennial summer of Chandler, Arizona, where the sun blasted the splintered rock and the agave plants sent up their centennial spires. "We have no choice," he"d told her, "if we"re going to have money to eat on," and the promise of San Marcos in the Desert, a hotel that would dwarf the Biltmore and bring in a commission of some $75,000 and maybe more, glowed on the horizon like a mirage, just beyond the windshield of the open Packard Frank piloted out front of their little caravan.81 At first they put up in a Phoenix hotel-more dislocation, more confusion, clothes in a suitcase and Svet and p.u.s.s.y looking as dazed as the parched and delirious Spaniards who first laid eyes on the place-but that experiment ended almost as quickly as it began. The expense of housing and feeding the whole troupe would have bankrupted them in a week-she told Frank that, told him again and again-and so Frank, never at a loss, hit on the idea of building a working camp on the job site. Ocatillo Camp was the result, a small miracle of timber and canvas, replete with kitchen, living areas, studio and bedrooms and the grand piano Frank insisted on installing no matter where he was. Electricity was brought in. Telephone lines. Water. Navajo rugs brightened the place and kept the dirt down. The girls browned in the sun. Herbert Mohl went back to the drafting table and Frank kept his whole team working through the day and into the night on the plans and models for the hotel and the New York City skysc.r.a.per.
They stayed through May, and then-because the heat was infernal, like an invisible wall you walked into every time you stepped out the door, and because the funding for the hotel hadn"t come through yet and because she was nagging Frank about Taliesin and the neglect it was falling into yet again-they decamped and drove back across the country to the verdant hills of Wisconsin. "Mama, it"s so green," p.u.s.s.y cried out, and it was, Taliesin, as green as life. There were the old smells, old faces, the animals and the fields and the daily reward of being alive to Frank"s creation. For his part, Frank kept working. Kept pushing. And the funding for both projects kept floating just out of reach, $19,000 added to their debt now as the cost of Ocatillo Camp, a place already vandalized, already tumbling to ruin, money run like water through their hands, but who could have guessed what was coming in October of that year?82 No one. Least of all Frank.
The commissions evaporated. The leaves blazed and fell. No one was building anything. And here came the holidays again and the cold and the compulsion to live with less, to do without, to pinch and sc.r.a.pe and h.o.a.rd even as Frank, mercurial as always, denied himself nothing and the debts mounted. The draftsmen drifted away, all but for Herbert, who stayed on-as did Billy Weston and a handful of the workmen-for the promise of sustenance alone. Christmas was narrow, New Year"s narrower yet.
There came a day just after the New Year when Olgivanna was helping the housemaid with the wash, stringing wet clothing on a line in one of the back rooms (the girls" things, always filthy, half a dozen of Frank"s shirts, his underwear and socks), feeling vaguely irritated because the housemaid claimed she had a touch of the flu and wasn"t feeling well if you please, ma"am, and there was so much to be done. The previous day"s thaw that took the temperatures up into the thirties had been nothing more than a tease-a high-pressure system had settled in overnight and when she woke that morning the thermometer in the courtyard had registered ten below zero. Which was part of the problem she was now having-the clothes had stiffened on the line because the fireplace wasn"t drawing properly and no matter how much wood she stacked up she got nothing but the palest feeble lick of flame. And Mrs. Dunleavy (rehired because there was no one else) was all but useless, shifting about as if her feet had been nailed to the floor, her eyes rheumy and her face the color and consistency of the ball of dough Olgivanna had set aside to rise in the kitchen.
Exasperated, her fingers stiff and the breath hanging like a shroud at the tip of her nose-she might as well have been outside for all the good the fire did her-she dropped the garment in her hands, crossed the room and bent impatiently to the fireplace. She poked at the fire a moment without effect, then s.n.a.t.c.hed up the tongs and began extracting the logs, one by one, laying them on the stone ap.r.o.n though they were half-burnt and smoking still. "It could be the flue, ma"am," Mrs. Dunleavy opined, even as the room filled with smoke. Olgivanna squinted up the chimney. The flue was open, as far as she could determine, but she beat at it with the poker in any case, leaning deep into the aperture and running the iron rod as far up the chimney as she could, hoping to dislodge some of the soot and resin there. She tried to keep her eyes closed, working the poker by touch, running it round and round, beating at the stone till she could feel the blackened particles sifting down into her hair and settling on the back of her neck. Then the larger chunks began to fall, and more yet, soot everywhere and the room choked with smoke.
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 Inst.i.tute 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 f.l.a.n.g.e 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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s 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, when 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 s.h.i.t-caked geta when I should be designing buildings back home in j.a.pan? 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 a.s.sembled 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, f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o. 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 j.a.panese 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-h.e.l.l 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 j.a.pan, 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 feminine 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.
"h.e.l.lo!" 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 st.u.r.dy 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.
The other woman-or girl, I suppose, since she was all of nineteen-was unremarkable, but for the quick seizure and release of her damp bovine eyes. And her freckles, freckles that maculated every visible swath of her skin-her wrists and ankles, the backs of her hands, her cheeks, her brow, her chin. Her name was Gwendolyn Greiner. Her eyes took hold of me. "Who are you?" she demanded.
I bowed deeply and resolutely. "Tadashi Sato," I said. The rain cascaded from the eaves. There was a smell of drenched fields, of mold, hidden rot, rurality. "Wrieto-San sent me."
"Who?" Gwendolyn Greiner in that moment exhibited two characteristics that would define her during the coming weeks and months at Taliesin: an a.s.saultive peevishness, nasally inflected, and an interrogatory lifting of her upper lip, exposing the outsized dent.i.tion of a horse. Did I like her? No, not at all. And her freckles-her spots-gave me a genuine shudder of revulsion. To think of her forearms beneath the sleeves of her coat and the material of her dress, her upper arms, her chest, her back, her-well, I"m sorry to have to interject a personal prejudice here, but in my view the skin of a young woman should be as smooth and unmarked as the softest chamois, a beginner"s skin, a virgin"s, a child"s.
I bowed again, my eyes on Daisy, who held the cigarette to her lips as insouciantly as if she were already installed in her room, her clothes hung neatly in the closet, books on the shelf, her feet ensconced in embroidered slippers and the fire snapping brightly in the hearth. "My apologies. What I mean to say is Mr. Wright. Mr. Wright has sent me for you. From Taliesin."
Gwendolyn: "You? You"re from Taliesin?"
"Yes," I said, my greeter"s smile beginning to fade. "I"m one of Wrieto-San"s-Mr. Wright"s-senior apprentices."
It was then that Daisy spoke for the first time. "Oh, for Pete"s sake, Gwen, can"t you see he"s just trying to help?" She was on her feet now, coming toward me with her hand outstretched, her lips contorted as she expelled a ribbon of smoke over her shoulder. "And what did you say your name was again?" she asked, taking my hand in hers. (Her eyes were the deep venerable blue of Noritake ware, incidentally, and her skin was flawless.) "Tadashi," I repeated, bowing so deeply my forehead grazed her wrist. "Tadashi Sato."
Gwendolyn Greiner gave me a face, then ducked into the car while I fumbled with the maddening angles of the trunk. To her credit, Daisy braved the rain and did her best to help me secure it in the rumble seat-"No, no, Tadashi, here, this way," she murmured, touching my arm for emphasis as the streets ran and the rain fell and everything in the palpable universe dripped. We managed finally to wedge the thing nose-down on the sopping seat, and since I had no rope with me (I"d been prepared for suitcases, carpetbags and the like, but not an object of this size, and I began to wonder if Daisy and her companion had somehow confused Taliesin with a resort hotel in the Catskills or maybe a transoceanic liner), we had to hope that the force of gravity would keep it there for the run home.
And it might have, but for the rudimentary lesson in physics presented by the final incline of the Taliesin drive. In order to coast clear of the mud I had no choice but to open up the engine and hit the drive at speed, the rear wheels fishtailing (wonderful expression, incidentally) and the Bearcat straining against the grade. At some point, the steering wheel seemed to develop a life of its own, as if animated by a hidden spirit pulling in opposition to my conscious efforts to keep the wheels beneath us and the cha.s.sis right side up while making forward progress at such a speed as to render the mud impotent. We were perhaps three-quarters of the way to the top, the crest of the hill and the welcoming arms of the courtyard in sight, when there was a sudden lurch, Gwendolyn Greiner spitting out air as if she were drowning and both girls bracing themselves against the dash as the trunk sprang free and catapulted into the muck behind us even as the Bearcat skated to the right and came to rest against one of the half-grown trees we"d planted the previous spring to enliven the prospect of the drive.
Daisy was closest to me. I could smell her perfume, lilac and lavender. Her eyes were wide. I was embarra.s.sed to a certain degree-I"d hoped for a better outcome, but as Wrieto-San was always saying when one of us broke a leg or stuck a pitchfork through his hand, "Something always happens in the country."
"Jesus," Gwendolyn Greiner hissed, leaning past Daisy to give me a mottled glare, "where did you learn to drive?"
The trunk had come to rest a hundred feet behind us. The tree was still in place, though it was canted ever so slightly away from us and the front fender of the Bearcat was showing a drepanoid scar of pit-of-h.e.l.l black beneath the Cherokee red. I gave her the only answer I could think of-"Chicago"-and Daisy, bless her, burst into laughter. Her laugh was contagious, dimpled, sweet, musical, and in the next moment Gwendolyn and I were laughing too, laughing so hard the car rocked with the force of it even as the rain began to slake and the mud firmed beneath the wheels.
Ultimately, though I labored mightily to free the thing, we were forced to abandon the car where it was, slosh down the drive to recover the trunk (or at least I sloshed down the drive to recover the trunk, forever dutiful, and yes, proper) and make our ponderous way up the grade, through the courtyard and on up to the kitchen door. The girls had a sodden suitcase in each hand and a pair of dripping carpetbags flung over their shoulders, while I dragged the trunk along its own widening furrow in the mud. Our shoes were basted black, my trousers were ready for the sc.r.a.p heap, and the girls" skirts clung wetly-and intriguingly-to their thighs. We stood there a moment, shivering beneath the eaves, before I thought to kick off my shoes and crack the kitchen door.
Immediately I was struck by a gland-clenching whiff of cabbage soup a la Montenegro and the shrill rising tones of Mrs. Wright, who was stationed at the counter with Emma, Mabel and an onion-chopping apprentice. "Out!" she shouted. "Get out now-you"re all mud!"
"But, Mrs. Wrieto-San," I began, instinctively narrowing the aperture to a crack, "I"ve got the new apprentices with me, Greiner and Hartnett. Women. Two women."
In the next moment, Mrs. Wright was at the door, thrusting her long mournful face at us. Gwendolyn put on a smile. Daisy was trying to light a cigarette. "There is no smoking to be allowed on the premises," Mrs. Wright said in a flat voice, no offense meant, none taken. "Mr. Wright is opposed. And I also."
She held the door half-open. The apprentice-he"d arrived the previous day and I didn"t yet know his name-gave me a look of bewilderment, as if he couldn"t imagine how he"d wound up swapping his drafting tools for an ap.r.o.n and a paring knife. Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the hens emerge from the garage, pick at something in the mud and vanish into the shadows. Rain drooled from the eaves. "And I am afraid," Mrs. Wright went on in her thumping orotund tones, "-Well, you"re all mud and you will have to change before we can . . . Tadashi, you will show them to their rooms, won"t you? " She made a sweep of her chin for emphasis and revolved her eyes round the sockets like an actor signaling to the wings. "Outside, down the courtyard behind you-in your old quarters?"
She made a question of it, as if I might somehow mistake her and bring the girls tramping through the Blue Loggia or the living room, which were off-limits to apprentices save for those glorious few hours each Sunday at dinner, but there was no misconstruing her intentions. Now that I was settled into Hillside with a number of the other male apprentices, she intended to segregate the females here at the main house. Where she could, presumably, keep an eye on them.
I gave a short bow. "Yes, of course, Mrs. Wrieto-San."
She focused on Gwendolyn and Daisy then, her mouth struggling toward a parting of the lips in what was meant to be a gracious smile. "And welcome, girls. Welcome to Taliesin. We will have a good deal of time to make our introductions once you have dried yourselves." She paused. The smile closed down, replaced by an interrogatory moue. "You do cook, don"t you? "
The more I consider it now, what with the pa.s.sage of time and the reflection on certain painful matters my grandson-in-law"s collaboration in these pages has afforded me, the more I come to realize that Mrs. Wright was as culpable in suppressing my relationship with Daisy-"throwing a wet blanket over it," as the expression goes-as her husband. Certainly they were in league in this. I don"t mean to suggest that Wrieto-San himself harbored any racial bias-certainly all the evidence, both public and private, shows unequivocally that he revered my people and my culture-but undeniably he exhibited what I can only call hypocrisy in his att.i.tude not only toward my love affair but the personal affairs of all the apprentices. What am I trying to say? He was a dictator-Daddy Frank-and she, Mrs. Wright, Olga Lazovich Milanoff Hinzenberg Wright, was his accomplice and henchman. Or henchwoman. It was as simple as this: because of their own scandalous conduct during what scholars call "the lost years" and the way in which it had adversely affected relations with the community and, more materially, Wrieto-San"s ability to earn a living as a working architect, they were both determined to stifle any odor of impropriety in the Fellowship. If that meant manipulating the lives and emotions of the young people under their guidance, then so be it, without regret or further review: realpolitik.
Right from the beginning, Daisy and I were attracted to each other, all cultural and racial differences aside. There was the look she"d given me at the station, the natural grace with which she accepted my a.s.sistance, and, after I"d delivered the trunk to the room she was sharing with Gwendolyn (and wrestled it through the narrow doorway, skinning an elbow and barking both shins in the process), the lingering handshake she"d offered up as a reward. And why not? Despite my demurrals, I was more than simply presentable-my mother wrote repeatedly to tell me how handsome and elegant I appeared in the photos I sent her, and my previous lover, the one who"d left me for the trombone player and will remain nameless here, avowed that I was all the talk of the girls" dormitory and more than once a.s.sured me I put the other men to shame, in bed and out. (Which begs the question, rather puzzlingly, as to why she broke off with me.) Further, as I"ve mentioned, the outdoor life had transformed me into a rugged, perhaps even dashing figure. I had a ready wit, my English was adequate, my talent for architectural design as great or greater than that of any of my fellow apprentices, and I was descended from one of the oldest and most venerated families in j.a.pan. Was it any wonder Daisy fell for me?
That very first night, after an excruciating dinner during which all the men fumbled round trying to make conversation with the new arrivals and Herbert Mohl goggled at Daisy as if she"d been served up on the half sh.e.l.l for him and him alone, I took her aside and asked her to join me-or rather us, a mixed group of us-for a nightcap at the local tavern. We were standing in the corner of the dining room, Gwendolyn distracted by the attentions of four or five male apprentices who apparently didn"t share my prejudice with regard to epidermal blemishes, the rain descending from the gutterless eaves with a Niagara roar, the electric lights flickering, the air steamy, fecund, everything held in abeyance as we each privately weighed the option of turning in early or indulging our youthful high spirits. I was obliged to raise my voice in order to be heard over the tumult of the rain. "Would you like to go for a drink?" I practically shouted at the very moment that Wrieto-San and Mrs. Wright, accompanied by Svetlana and Iovanna, sallied into the room.
I don"t know if my face blanched or if the final fatal noun stuck in my throat, but I was taken by surprise. We all were. The fact was that the Wrights rarely joined us after dining, but rather went round outside, down the hill and across the courtyard and into their quarters. On this particular night, however, they apparently chose the expedient of remaining indoors as long as possible, pa.s.sing through our dining room and kitchen before braving the rain. In any case, Wrieto-San was his usual self, gesturing and broadcasting, making quips about the weather and Yen"s new haircut, but Mrs. Wright looked up sharply, as if she"d heard me. I smiled. Bowed. Waved. But she was already pa.s.sing by and I dropped my voice to finish the invitation: "At Stuffy"s."
Daisy-I"d already complimented her on how much better she looked in a dry blouse and mudless skirt-leaned in complicitly. "Stuffy"s?" She let out a low laugh-or more of a giggle, actually. "Sounds like a mattress factory. Or pillows. Feather pillows."