Loving Frank (24 page)

Edwin had never wanted a dog in the house. They made him sneeze and left hair all over the place.

“Honey, this fellow belongs to someone,” Mamah said. “He’s too clean to have been living out in the open.” She hated to burst John’s bubble, but it seemed crueler to let him hope.

That evening they made a bed for the dog on the floor of the cabin. They found straw and a blanket to put inside a large box they got from behind the lodge. Then they all lay down around the dog and smothered him with strokes and kisses. The dog panted patiently while Martha clung to his neck, cooing, “You’re a good dog.”

Watching the children, Mamah could see already what she would do. She would let the signs stay up for another two days. Maybe one. And if no one claimed him (
please, God, don’t let anyone claim him
), she would quietly go around and take them down.

There were still two weeks ahead of them, fourteen whole days to swim with the dog, teach him to catch, name him, sleep with him. When they had to leave in August, the dog could go with them on the train. If Edwin didn’t want him, and she knew he wouldn’t, then he would go to Wisconsin with her.

Maybe it was unfair to make the dog’s home Wisconsin as an enticement to her children to visit. Edwin would call it calculating, a ploy to buy her way back into their hearts. She didn’t care what he thought. To her, the dog was an opportunity for a second chance. She would take her grace where she found it.

CHAPTER
34

F
rank’s car bumped along Highway 14. He pointed out the landmarks to Mamah, the old farmhouses or trees that signified that Spring Green was fifty or sixty miles up ahead. The car was loaded with suitcases and boxes. Squeezed into a corner, the dog the children had named Lucky hung his head out the window despite the drizzle.

“Can you see that sign?” Frank gestured toward a barn in the distance.

Someone had painted an advertisement across one entire side of it. As they got closer, she could see that it was a realistic-looking bare foot. Only two words accompanied the picture:
ATHLETE’S FOOT
.

“Are they for it or against it?” she asked.

Frank laughed. “Welcome to Wisconsin.”

“I swear you developed an accent when we left Illinois.”

“Oh, you’ll have it in a month.”

For much of the drive, Frank regaled her with stories about his mother’s family. “Radical Unitarians,” he called them. “Real reformers.” His grandfather had settled in the Helena Valley just south of the Wisconsin River some fifty years before. Three of his mother’s brothers—Enos, James, and John—all had farms near the hill where Frank was building the new house. Only Jenkin Lloyd Jones had gone to the city to make his career as a Unitarian minister. He was living in Chicago and was quite well-known now, but even Uncle Jenk had bought land up here—a few acres on the Wisconsin River that he called Hill Top, where he ran a Chautauqua-type camp every summer. They were all accomplished, the whole lot of his aunts and uncles. They might argue among themselves, but they were loyal to one another. His relatives had been his first architectural clients. Early on he had designed a chapel for his grandfather’s old homestead and, later, for his schoolteacher aunts, a school.

Mamah’s anxiety grew as the family stories layered one upon another.
Oh Lord,
she thought,
what am I getting myself into?

Frank had promised her one spectacular milestone before they reached Spring Green. Now he pointed toward a vast wall of sedimentary rock stretching across a field in the distance. “There it is—God in stripes,” he said. “We’re ten miles from home.”

They fell into silence. Outside, the rainy landscape was a charcoal lesson in perspective, with the road curling like a black ribbon through the fields ahead. In the foreground, growing in ditches, sumac trees raised their rusty deltoid fingertips, while in the far distance, hills receded in deepening grays. Horses grazed midground in pastures of pale grass. From time to time the entire vista disappeared behind towering hunks of rock, shaggy with white pine upstarts rooted in their cracks.

Southwestern Wisconsin, with its rolling unglaciated hills, seemed to her to be the very stuff of Frank’s brain. Always Wisconsin had been there in his imaginings, an undulating canvas waiting for him to draw a fitting house into its contours. In the grayness of the August rain, though, the hills had a brooding feeling.

How different from Germany,
she thought. In Berlin her eye had never traveled farther than the row of shops or houses across any given street. Nature seemed to be somewhere outside the city limits. But it hadn’t mattered. Even the dust of the crumbling brick and stone had been invigorating.

“Are you afraid?”

“Some.”

“Truly?”

“Not afraid of living with you. But if you mean living near your mother and sister and cousins, yes. It makes me nervous.”

“You’ll win them over.” Frank reached across the seat and squeezed her hand. “Just be who you are, and the rest will come.”

“You forget I know your mother. From the Nineteenth Century Club. She’s…”

“Fierce?”

Mamah thought about the few times she had seen Anna Wright in action. She was smart, influential, and an umbrage taker. “Well…formidable,” she said. When she glanced sidelong at his face, she saw that he was wearing a wicked smile. “You seem to enjoy the idea that she might be fierce.”

“It’s not a bad thing to have someone fierce on your side. She’s intense about a lot of things, especially loyalty. She’s been forced to take sides. And when push comes to shove with her, it’s her people and her land. Give her time. She will adjust to you.”

“What about your aunts who run the school?”

“Oh, they’re wonderful. Huge hearts. But they’re probably squirming right now.”

“Afraid for their school’s reputation, now that we’re moving next door?”

“Don’t let it frighten you. These farmers can be sanctimonious, but they’re decent. We’ll be fattening up on their cookies before you know it.”

In that moment Mamah’s eye caught sight of a broad roof, limestone walls, and the sand-gold rectangles of stucco. The house nestled into the hill, wrapping itself around the area just below the rounded crown. Frank pulled the car over to the side of the road. He walked around to open the door for her, and they stood in the tall grass together. Mamah felt the goose bumps rising on her skin.

“I’d like to call it Taliesin, if it’s all right with you. Do you know Richard Hovey’s play
Taliesin
? About the Welsh bard who was part of King Arthur’s court? He was a truth-seeker and a prophet, Taliesin was. His name meant ‘shining brow.’ I think it’s quite appropriate.”

“Taliesin.” She tried the word in her mouth as she studied the house in the distance.

Indeed, the building glowed, in spite of the gray light. It was a shocking contrast to the little farmhouses she had seen on the way up to Spring Green. This house—the word seemed somehow wrong—was like nothing else she had ever seen. It looked so modern, so architected. Yet it was harmonious with the hills, its overhanging roofs echoing the pitch of the ridge. Elevated and isolated, away from other houses and set into this great golden vista, Taliesin was more like the villas around Fiesole than anything Frank had built in Oak Park.

“It’s brilliant,” she whispered. She took off her glasses, squinted, then put them on again.

“It’s for you,” he said.

Back in the car, Frank was jittery as he nosed up the hill toward the entrance driveway.

“Romeo and Juliet,” he said, pointing to a windmill in the distance he had built for his aunts’ school building. “See how one part leans in to the other?”

“It seems such a romantic name for a pair of teachers to choose.”

Frank laughed. “Oh, I chose the name. There’s not a Lloyd Jones who would admit to being a romantic. We prefer to be seen as hard-bitten.” He nodded at structures dotting the hills around the new house. “At one time, when I was young, there were sixty or seventy family members living on these hills around here. There’s Tan-Y-Deri.”

Tan-Y-Deri was his sister Jennie’s house. Mamah knew that story, too. Jennie had insisted on a prairie house for her family, like the kind he had built in Oak Park. Frank had wanted to build her a “natural” house, more in keeping with these hills. Persuasive as he was, Frank had failed to sell his younger sister on the idea. Jennie must be as stubborn as he, Mamah mused.

“Tan-Y-Deri is Welsh for ‘under the oaks,’” he was saying. He pointed off to the southeast. “That way is Uncle Enos’s place.”

“Why am I thinking of Italy right now?”

“You tell me.”

“I have this sense that each of your uncles’ homesteads is almost a little fiefdom, the way it was in the past in Tuscany.”

“You’re not far off,” Frank said. “People don’t call this place the Valley of the God-Almighty Joneses for nothing.”

The car crept up to a heavy entry column of roughly stacked stone blocks. Standing on top of the pier was a soaring statue of a classic-looking nude. The voluptuous curves of her body melded in white plaster with the straight lines of a skyscraper in front of her. The woman’s head was bent, and her hand was placing a capstone at the top of the building.

“Flower in the Crannied Wall,” Frank said, nodding toward the figure. “I had Bock make one for Taliesin.” It was the statue Mamah had seen the sculptor working on during one of her first visits to Frank’s studio in Oak Park.

“She looks magnificent here—like an angel guarding the place.”

The drive led the car under the roof of the porte cochere, then continued between the house on one side and an incline on the other. Mamah could already imagine clumps of daffodils climbing up that little hill. Ahead, at the end of the driveway, she saw workers coming and going in a courtyard. As she and Frank drew closer, she noticed that windows all along the back of the house faced out toward it. A private courtyard!

Workmen stopped to shade their eyes as the car inched along. When Frank opened the car door, they returned to their work, furiously mortaring and hammering as if they hadn’t noticed the new arrivals. Mamah wanted to race along the drive into the courtyard, but she stood stock-still instead. No one looked at her.

“Billy!” Frank called to the foreman, who was walking toward them now. The man was short, with a weathered brown face. Frank had told Mamah about the carpenter, how he could take one of Frank’s shorthand sketches in his battered hands and pace out its perimeter almost exactly without real drawings.

“Billy, I want you to meet someone. This is the lady of the house.”

Billy Weston’s pants were worn at the knees and in the place where he slung a hammer from a loop. He was not old, perhaps thirty-five, but everything about him had a faded quality. Even his blue eyes looked like pale eggs in an old nest. Mamah watched as the eyes registered confusion. Frank had obviously not explained anything in advance.

“How d’ya do, ma’am,” Billy mumbled, nodding.

“She will be the person to go to when I’m not here.”

Billy’s eyes flicked suspiciously on hers for a moment before he nodded again. Frank had said Billy didn’t always take instructions from him gladly. How could he possibly be happy about taking orders from her?

“Yessir.” Billy scratched behind his ear and shifted from foot to foot.

“You two ought to know each other pretty well by the time this place is done.”

“Done?” Billy grinned. “Nothin’s ever really done with you, Mr. Wright.”

Frank let out a belly laugh. “Billy’s as good as they come,” he said to Mamah as the man walked away. “You won’t find another carpenter like him out here.”

He walked Mamah through the length of the one-story building. The house was really three horizontal rectangles joined together into one U-shaped form that wrapped its arms around the hill. One arm of the U was a wing of bedrooms; the arm on the opposite side included barns for horses and cows, plus a garage. In between was the social and working space, a string of rooms with windows that faced out onto vast views of the valley below. In many places, glass doors led from the rooms onto terraces surrounding the house.

Frank toured her through the living room, their bedroom, then the bedroom that would be her children’s when they visited. He envisioned for her how each room would look. The house was exactly as he had described it, a place where shelter and nature were fused. She could picture how it would be when it was finished. How guests would walk through the entryway with its low ceiling that compressed down the space, making them feel a kind of tension. How they would suddenly, physically, feel that tension lift and joy replace it as they entered the expansive living room with its wide-open vistas of sky and green land as far as the eye could see.

What the eye saw now, though, was bare studs and lath board. Holes where doors and windows were to be placed. Vats for mixing plaster. Bags of sand. Sawhorses. And, everywhere, dust. Wood dust. Plaster dust. Dirt dust.

Frank saw the question on her face. “In a few weeks…”

“Where will we sleep?”

“At Jennie’s.”

“But…” She didn’t speak out loud what she was thinking.
Stay in the house where Jennie’s children are, where their Aunt Catherine usually stayed when she came with Frank? In the same house with Anna Wright?

As if on cue, Frank’s sister Jennie stepped through one of the openings, carrying a basket of lunch. She set it down on the floor, then came over and extended her hand.

“Mamah,” she said warmly, “how good to meet you.”

Mamah’s knees nearly buckled in gratitude. Frank had said Jennie would be kind. She was a pretty version of Frank’s mother, her dark hair parted and pulled tight at the nape of her neck. No one would mistake her for Frank’s sister, though. She had a shy manner, countered by penetrating dark eyes that stared at the speaker a moment too long, as if there were a deeper meaning to be had just below the surface of a remark.

“I have a room all ready for you up at the house,” she said.

“I think tonight we will stay here,” Frank said.

“On the floor? Are you sure?” Jennie’s eyes studied his.

“I’ll set up the bed I’ve got stored in the shed.”

“All right, then, if you insist. We’ll see you in the morning.”

Watching Frank’s sister step through piles of lumber as she headed back to her house, Mamah felt relief. “That wasn’t so hard,” she said. “It has to be strange for her.”

“Count her as a friend.”

Mamah and Frank walked down to the Wisconsin River below the house, followed by the dog. The rain had stopped. Along the river, peeling white birches shed bark like dead skin, revealing patches of pink underneath. Mamah and Frank ate the sandwiches Jennie had brought them, and watched the men load wheelbarrows full of sand.