Loving Frank (37 page)

She wouldn’t lie, though. She’d tell about more than the triumphs. She would write about the pitfalls—the way some women mistook sexual freedom for true selfhood. She would write about walls up ahead that were waiting to be hit. The mistakes. The guilt and regret. Not just the chances seized but the chances missed.

The problem with Ellen’s books was that they were too philosophical, with few real-life examples. What would she have given back in Berlin to read true stories of other women’s journeys toward personal freedom? Everything. If she could collect real accounts from women who’d gotten past their fears and the scorn and gossip to find their own worth in the world, to author their own futures, how powerful that would be.

She would have to tell her own story, too, though she didn’t know where to begin. For now she would write in her journal simply to get words on paper. She would imagine Else’s face, that’s what she would do, and tell it as if her friend were sitting across from her in the café.

Mamah felt an excitement she hadn’t experienced since she discovered Ellen’s work. Ideas were snapping like sparks inside her head, and she was afraid she might lose them. She ran out of the bedroom to fetch a pen and paper from her office and nearly knocked Julian to the ground, so surprised was she to find him standing quietly in the hallway, straightening a Japanese print.

CHAPTER
48

JUNE
23, 1914

BREAK OUT THE BEADED DRESS.

F.

T
he telegram arrived the day before her departure for Chicago. She had told Frank she would wear the beaded dress on the twenty-seventh. What he didn’t know was that the gown he’d bought her in Italy had long since been “broken out.” During the past month, she had put on the slip and gauzy beaded overdress a dozen times, turning in front of her bedroom mirror to assess her backside, then her silhouette, debating whether to wear it to the Midway Gardens opening. In the four years since he’d given it to her, the dress had hung unworn in a series of closets while her body rearranged itself.

Mamah had always hated vanity in middle-aged women. She and Mattie had promised each other they would let age take them gracefully, without the henna and powder. But looking at her reflection now, she hated what she saw. It wasn’t the dress, which was loose and forgiving. It was the softer, less-vivid, slightly out-of-date woman who stared back at her. At forty-five, she didn’t mind gray hair coming in or the crease between her brows. What she despised was the pull of gravity, because it made her look tired, while inside she felt young, with the crispest clarity of mind she’d known since she was twenty-five.

She tugged off the dress, folded it, and put it in her suitcase. How she looked wasn’t the important thing. It would be Frank’s night, anyway—a celebration long overdue.

Frank had not been home at all for two weeks, and only intermittently for the month before that. They had missed observing each other’s birthdays. In the last days before the opening, he wasn’t even returning to his pied-à-terre, sleeping instead on a pile of moving quilts and who knew what at the Gardens. He was working into the wee hours until he couldn’t anymore, then rising at six to work again.

During his last visit home, he had paced the floor, spilling out his worries. The developers hadn’t been able to raise adequate funds to cover building costs, but, overconfident, they had begun the construction anyway. They’d paid him five thousand dollars but now they were talking about settling the rest of his fee with stock. Poor Mueller, the contractor, had been forced to break the news to his workers on Friday that their wages for the week would be late.

Still, the place was going up, he told her, by God, it was going up. And what a cast of characters was on-site every day—painters, sculptors, master tradesmen, engineers, musicians, chefs. All of them talented, all trying to make their mark. Between the artists and the union reps, the place was crawling with more prima donnas than an opera company reunion. Iannelli was but one. Frank had the creeping fear that he’d made an awful mistake in hiring a couple of well-known Modernist painters to do murals. He’d given them general guidelines and specific colors to use. What he’d seen so far, however, was all wrong.

“The murals are going to fight the architecture,” he told her. “I know it already.”

“Then stand your ground,” Mamah said. “You’re worn down, but now is not the time to falter, not on a job this important. This is the first time the public will really experience one of your buildings. It’s going to open the eyes of thousands—millions—over time. Why use murals that don’t make you happy? You can do them later.”

“You’re right, of course.” Frank squeezed her hand.

She knew he didn’t need her advice. It took immense ego to build an enormous structure the likes of which had never been seen before, all the while assuring doubters that it would turn out brilliantly. But it took courage and vision, too. What he needed was her support, and she gave it without condition.

Break out the beaded dress.
She laughed out loud. With bricklayers and angry artists to deal with, he was planning each little detail of opening night, down to what Mamah would wear. It was pure Frank, orchestrating every bit of the experience. And in his way, Frank was telling her what they both knew—the opening was a coming-out for them. It would be the unveiling of his first public building in Chicago, and their first public appearance together since the scandal. He wanted the whole thing, including her, to be perfect.

WHEN SHE ARRIVED
in Chicago, she left her bags at the coach house and hopped on the El train to the south side. She got off at Fifty-ninth and Jackson Park, the same stop she had exited so many times when she was attending classes at the university. Looking at the young people passing her along the Midway Plaisance, she imagined what a curiosity she must have seemed ten years before, when she was studying the novel with Robert Herrick. She had thought of the students as peers. But these college kids—had she grown hopelessly old, or were they babies even then and she just hadn’t noticed?

In the distance, she saw that the two square towers anchoring either end of the long yellow-brick building had risen higher since she was last here. Frank had stacked up more balconies, one on top of another, in a feat of derring-do. He called these towers belvederes, and she could see that the balconies would offer fine views. Above the top floor, a cantilevered roof seemed to float free of the building beneath it.

As she got closer, she saw how complex the surface texture of the building was. How playful. Every plane seemed to be decorated in some pattern, from the yellow-brick-and-mortar base to the concrete-block walls above that were patterned like woven fabric. To announce the carefree atmosphere of the space within, Frank had stationed statues of sprites on either side of the main entrance, their heads bent down. They seemed to wink at Mamah as she passed through the entry.

Inside one belvedere, an artist standing on scaffolding was putting the first brushes of color on the dreaded mural. She could see lines sketched out on the wall above her but could not discern in them the disaster Frank envisioned. She walked on, down a long hallway and into the soaring indoor winter garden, where tiers multiplied into more tiers as her eyes went up and around.

A concrete mixer in the middle of the room made the space rumble. Fumes from wet mortar floated in the afternoon light pouring through the windows. A spry old deliveryman tipped his hat as he whizzed past her with a cartful of flowers and green plants. “Ain’t this something?” he called out.

She tried to imagine what the tiers would look like tomorrow night. Diners would be sitting at tables, looking down on the checkerboard dance floor at the center of the room. All the balconies would eventually trail ivy. The place
did
bring to mind the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Frank had said some people thought it looked like Aztec pyramids.

She saw those things and more—the beer gardens she and Frank had visited in Berlin and Potsdam; the terraces they’d walked in Italy. The statues of women Frank had used to line the sunken gardens brought to mind the rectangular stone pillars topped with carved human heads that she’d seen in Italian gardens. But they reminded her of Japan, too—their angular headdresses like abstract geisha wigs. Frank had fused what he’d experienced and seen into something entirely new: a waking fantasy.

More than anything, what struck Mamah was the absolute joy he had expressed at Midway Gardens. After all its changes, the structure had turned out to be as playful as the sprites at the front door.
This
was a “good times place.” It would bring delight to so many people.

Everywhere she looked, she saw him at play. Up at the top of the walls, in a frieze of stained-glass windows, scattered red-glass kites trailed black tails against the sky outside. She imagined Frank holding the strings to each of them, keeping them all afloat at once, his heart as full as any kite flyer’s ever was.

“May-mah!” John Vogelsang was flying through the winter garden when he spotted her and bent down to buss her on the cheek. “How are you? Does Frank know you’re here?”

“No, I sneaked out here to taste the excitement.”

“Don’t talk to me about tasting. I have tasted so much today, my tongue hurts.”

“Are you ready?”

He shrugged. “If the waiters show up. If the cooks show up. If the people come.”

“The people will come,” she said.

“Say, how are the Carltons working out?”

“They’re wonderful, though I think Gertrude is a little lonely out in the country. She confessed as I left that she wished she were going into the city.”

“She can cook, can’t she?”

“It’s a miracle.”

“Have her prepare callalloo. We couldn’t get enough of it in our house. She can’t get real callalloo in these parts, so she uses spinach.” A worried-looking man approached Vogelsang then, and the restaurateur made his apologies to her. “Okra and crab meat,” he called as he waved goodbye. “You won’t believe it.”

Mamah walked out to a balcony overlooking the summer garden. The orchestra was rehearsing in the pavilion, and she listened closely. They were playing Saint-Saëns, and it sounded exquisite. She understood what Frank had done—created a symphony hall with these receding terraces and balconies. Cars might be rumbling down Cottage Grove Avenue, but from where she stood, the music was as clear as if she were in the first balcony of the Berlin Opera House.

She caught sight of him below, going over some drawings with a bearded man, probably Paul Mueller. Out in the vast open-air square, chairs and tables were lined up in perfect rows. The sight of them sent a pleasant shiver of anticipation down her arms. Lord, how long had it been since she’d gone to a party? How she loved them! She thought of the beaded dress and the frightening prospect of people staring at her tomorrow night, eager to get a gander at Frank’s “affinity.” She turned and hurried out the front door to the train stop.

A HALF HOUR LATER,
Mamah sat in a barber’s chair in the hair salon at the Palmer House. Once before, when she was staying there during a visit with the children, a sweet woman had trimmed her long hair. But that woman was nowhere in sight. A young man stood before her now, holding the picture she’d seen displayed in the window. She had come to the salon not knowing what she wanted done to her hair, only something miraculous that would make her feel pretty and young again. When she’d seen the picture in the window, she’d stopped in her tracks. The illustration showed a woman with short hair cropped at the jawline. It was Else’s haircut.

“It’s called the Curtain, madam,” the hairdresser said. The man had a solemn demeanor at odds with the name embroidered on his barber coat—Curly. His fiercely wavy hair, which he had chosen to celebrate rather than fight, was clearly the source of his nickname. Parted on the left, his hair rose up and out from the right side of his head in a mass of miniature waves that shaped themselves into a tilted cone, the point of which was a good eight inches from his scalp.

Mamah shifted on the red leather seat of the barber chair. Looking at the man’s outlandish hair, she regretted the impulse that had propelled her in here. Damn vanity! She wondered if his haircut had a name, too.

The barber wrapped paper tape around her neck and threw a cape over her. Mamah breathed in and pointed to the picture of the Curtain. “I’ll have that,” she said.

“But madam, your hair is not straight,” he protested.

“Straight enough,” she said. “I’ll take my chances.”

He began chopping her hair off in chunks a foot long, then worked to get the thick mop even. It shocked her to see mounds of dark brown hair piled like hay on the floor. The man had a low stool on wheels and rolled around on the thing, circling her, snipping her hair from underneath. The whole experience seemed bizarre, yet she found herself confiding to the barber about the opening and what she planned to wear.

When he stood up, he took a tapered comb from a jar of alcohol, rinsed and dried it in the sink, then neatened the part down the middle of her head. In the mirror, a woman not unlike Else stared back at her. A smile spread across Mamah’s face. The haircut was wonderful—stark, unconventional, and pretty all at once.

“Very European,” the hairdresser said, pleased with himself. “Tip your head down.”

She obeyed, and the hair fell forward. “You see how the Curtain works? Now lift up your face.” The barber beamed. “And there you are,” he said triumphantly. “Unveiled.”