Loving Frank
CONTENTS
FOR KEVIN
ONE LIVES BUT ONCE IN THE WORLD.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I
t was Edwin who wanted to build a new house. I didn’t mind the old Queen Anne on Oak Park Avenue. It was full of the things of my childhood, and I found it comforting after so many years away. But Ed was possessed by the idea of having something modern. I wonder if he reflects on those days now—on the fact that it was he who craved a place entirely his own.
When we returned from our honeymoon in the fall of 1899, we moved into the house I grew up in for the sake of my widowed father, who had never adjusted to living alone. At thirty, after years of study and solitude and independence, I found myself sharing dinners not only with a new husband but also with my father and my sisters, Jessie and Lizzie, who often came by to visit. Papa still went off to work to run the Chicago & North Western’s repair shops.
It was not long after Edwin and I settled in that my father returned home from his job one day, curled up in his bed, and passed to the other side. At seventy-two, he wasn’t a young man, but he had always seemed invulnerable to my sisters and me. His sudden loss left all of us reeling. What I didn’t know then was that the worst was yet to come. A year later, Jessie died giving birth to a baby girl.
How can I tell the grief of that year? I only remember parts of 1901, so numbly did I move through it. When it became clear that Jessie’s husband would be hard-pressed to properly care for the infant he had named Jessica after my sister, Ed and Lizzie and I took in our niece. I was the only one not working, so it fell to me to care for her. In the midst of our mourning, the baby brought unexpected joy into that old house.
The place was laden with memories that should have haunted me, I suppose. But my hands were too full. In a year’s time Ed and I had our own child, John, who was an early walker. We had no nurse in those days, and only a part-time housekeeper. At night I was too spent to lift a book.
Still, in the three years I had been married, it hadn’t been so hard to be Mrs. Edwin Cheney. Ed was kind and rarely complained—a badge of pride with him. At the beginning, he came home nearly every day to a parlor crowded with Borthwick women, and he seemed genuinely pleased to see us all. He is not an unsophisticated man. But he draws his contentment from simple things—Cuban cigars, the morning streetcar ride with the other men, tinkering with his automobile.
The one thing Edwin has never been able to abide is disorder, though, and he must have been tried sorely in those years on Oak Park Avenue. His touchstones are the surfaces of furniture: his papers neatly waiting on his desk at work in the morning; his personal cabinet where he puts his briefcase and keys when he comes home; the dinner table where his fondest wish is to find a roast and the people he loves gathered around it, waiting for him.
I suppose it was order, or the lack of it, that finally pushed him to do something beyond talk about a new house. I tried to keep things neat, but what can anyone do about a dark old place with windows painted shut and fretwork curlicues cluttering the corners of every doorframe? What can you do about horsehair-stuffed furniture with two decades of dust that simply can’t be pounded out?
What Edwin did was quietly begin his campaign. First he took me to the home of Arthur Huertley and his wife. He and Arthur rode the streetcar together in the morning. Just about everyone in Oak Park had made it a point to stroll past the Huertleys’ new house on Forest Avenue. It was either an outrageous aberration or a stroke of brilliance, depending upon how you felt about its architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. A “prairie house,” some called it, for the way courses of long, narrow bricks ran horizontally across it, like the lines of the Illinois flatlands.
When I first saw it, the Huertleys’ house looked like a heavy rectangular box to me. Once inside, though, I felt my lungs expand. It was all open space, with one room flowing into the next. Unpainted beams and woodwork the color of tree trunks gleamed softly, and the most glorious light poured through the green and red stained-glass windows. It felt sacred inside, like a woodland chapel.
Edwin, engineer that he is, sensed something else inside those walls. He was basking in the harmony induced by rational systems. Built-in drawers. Clean-lined chairs and tables made specifically for those very rooms—furniture with a purpose. There wasn’t a superfluous object in sight. Edwin walked out whistling.
“How can we ever afford a house like that?” I asked when we were out of earshot.
“Ours doesn’t have to be that big,” he said. “And we’re doing better than you think.”
Edwin was the president of Wagner Electric by then. While I had been changing diapers, trying to find a little time for a walk outside, Edwin had been methodically making his way up to the top of the company.
“I know Frank Wright’s wife,” I confessed. I had been ambivalent about encouraging Edwin, so I hadn’t mentioned it. “She’s on the Home and Arts Committee with me at the club.”
That was when his campaign picked up steam. It isn’t Edwin’s way to demand, but he nudged very forcefully after that, in much the way he had courted me. Persistence. Persistence. Persistence. If he had been alive during the Crusades, that’s what his banner would have read as he galloped off to battle.
It was his doggedness that wore me down to marry him in the first place.
We had known each other at school in Ann Arbor, but I hadn’t thought about him in several years. Suddenly, he appeared one day at the boardinghouse where I lived in Port Huron. He had a gift for small talk and an infectious laugh. It didn’t take long for him to win over the inhabitants of Mrs. Sanborn’s boardinghouse on Seventh Street. When, to my dismay, he began to show up on Friday evenings, the landlady and her little family of renters—including my college roommate Mattie Chadbourne—cleared out of the parlor so the relationship could blossom.
I was running the public library back then and was usually pretty tired on Friday evening when Edwin called on me. One night, merely to fill the awkward air between us, I told him about an employee who seemed always to be moping, despite my efforts to encourage her.
“Tell her happiness is just practice,” he said. “If only she acted happy, she would be happy.” There was something profoundly appealing at that moment in those words. Edwin wasn’t literary or particularly reflective; his strengths were different from my own. He was a good man. And he got things done.
All those years in Port Huron, while I was teaching at the high school and, later, running the library, I romanticized what I did by day—handmaiden to knowledge, doctor of the soul, dispensing books like pills to my students and patrons. At night though, I lived uneasily among stacks of papers in my room: a long, unfinished essay on individualism in the Woman Movement, an unpublished translation of some eighteenth-century French essayist who had possessed me for a while, books upon books with pages marked by newspaper clippings, envelopes, pencils, postcards, hair combs. Despite great bursts of energy, I couldn’t seem to put together a proper magazine article, let alone the book I imagined I would eventually write.
I had been in Port Huron for six years. My friends were marrying around me. Looking across the parlor that day at Ed Cheney, I thought,
Maybe our traits will rub off on each other.
I suppose I said yes to a new house the way I said yes to the balding young man who kept traveling from Chicago to Port Huron to ask me to marry him. After a point, I just plunged in.
In those early days of our marriage, it wasn’t only order Edwin pined for. He wanted a home where we could entertain. Perhaps it was too many years spent in his own parents’ humorless household, or maybe it was the sadness still floating through the rooms of my folks’ home, but he wanted a place full of youngsters and friends and good times. I suspect he pictured his college glee club sitting around the living room, singing “I Love You Truly.” In any case, things moved rapidly once Catherine Wright arranged a meeting for us at Frank’s studio.
Who wouldn’t be charmed by Frank Lloyd Wright? Edwin was. I was. There we were in the light-filled octagonal room attached to their house, with the
enfant terrible
of Oak Park architecture, the “Tyrant of Taste,” someone at the club had called him, and he was listening to
us.
Did we entertain? What kind of music did we enjoy? Was I a gardener?
He looked to be around thirty-five or so, close to my age, and he was very handsome—wavy brown hair, a high forehead, intelligent eyes. People said he was eccentric, and I suppose he was, given that a big tree was growing straight up through the middle of his house. But he was also wildly funny and intensely serious in turns. I remember two of his children were up on the balcony above us, sailing paper airplanes down at the drafting tables. There were several young men bent over drawings, but the main architect who worked for him was a woman—a woman!—Marion Mahony. Frank sat there calmly sketching in the midst of it all, seemingly oblivious to the chaos above him.
By the end of the afternoon, we had a thumbnail sketch to take home with us: a house with two levels, similar to the Huertleys’, only on a smaller scale. We would live on the upper floor, with a dining room, living room, and library that all flowed into one another; a great fireplace would stand at the heart of the house; and window seats all around would accommodate a crowd. A wall of stained-glass doors across the front of the house would open onto a large terrace surrounded by a brick wall that kept it private. If you stood out on the front sidewalk, you wouldn’t be able to see into the house because of the wall. But from inside, up high, you’d have a fine prospect for viewing the world outside; in fact, you’d feel part of nature, because Frank Wright had designed the house around existing trees on the lot. Small bedrooms were tucked at the back of the house. And there was a lower floor where my sister Lizzie would eventually have an apartment.
After that visit, Edwin didn’t have to prod anymore. I took on the job of working with Frank, who seemed delighted by my tentative suggestions. Standing at the work site on East Avenue with John on my hip, I started to comprehend cantilevered roofs and the rhythmic beauty of bands of leaded windows he called “light screens.” Pretty soon I was part of the team. I spent hours dreaming up a garden plan with a landscape architect, Walter Griffin, at the studio. By the time we moved into “the good times house,” as Frank had called it from the beginning, we counted the Wrights among our friends.
I still think about my parents’ old house on Oak Park Avenue. I remember so vividly the night Ed and I got married there. My sisters had filled the parlor with yellow and blue flowers, the University of Michigan’s colors. A mandolin orchestra played the wedding march from
Lohengrin.
Mattie, my closest friend, was my maid of honor, and I recall thinking she looked prettier than I that night. I was far too nervous, perspiring through the silk. But Edwin was his steady self. He pulled me into a corner when it was all over and promised to be my anchor. “Take my love for granted,” he said, “and I shall do the same for you.”
Why didn’t I write down those words then? When I look at them now, they seem a recipe for disaster.
It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me. If I can piece all these bits of memory together with the diaries and letters and the scribbled thoughts that clutter my mind and bookshelves, then maybe I can explain what happened. Maybe the worlds I have inhabited for the past seven years will assume order and logic and wholeness on paper. Maybe I can tell my story in a way that is useful to someone else.
Mamah Bouton Borthwick
August 1914