The Women (11 page)
The worst of it, though, even worse than the crowds that had gathered round to fold their arms and gossip and chew as if the tragedy were their entertainment for the evening (“Hyenas,” Frank called them), was the press. The reporters were there at first light, clamoring for a statement. They didn’t care that Frank was exhausted, mentally and physically, that he’d just suffered a loss greater no doubt than any of them had ever experienced or that he might need time to recover himself—all they cared about was when and where and how and didn’t this happen before and can you tell us how you feel? At this juncture, that is? Mr. Wright, Mr. Wright! Can you give us a statement? He turned a heavy face to them, alive only in his eyes, and gave them what they wanted because he was a public figure, because he was famous, because he had to. He told them he was relieved in that no lives had been lost, that he regretted having been so poor a trustee for the great works of art that had been inadvertently destroyed—valued at half a million, that’s right, half a million at least
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—and that yes, he intended to rebuild. And then Billy Weston and some of the other workmen escorted them off the property so that they could race one another to town to wire the stories already taking shape in the scrawled-over pages of their notepads: WRIGHT BUNGALOW GONE; FIRE AT TALIESIN; BLAZE DESTROYS LOVE COTTAGE OF FRANK L. WRIGHT.
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—and that yes, he intended to rebuild. And then Billy Weston and some of the other workmen escorted them off the property so that they could race one another to town to wire the stories already taking shape in the scrawled-over pages of their notepads: WRIGHT BUNGALOW GONE; FIRE AT TALIESIN; BLAZE DESTROYS LOVE COTTAGE OF FRANK L. WRIGHT.
A lesser man would have been defeated, or at least bowed, but not Frank. Before the ashes had cooled he was drawing, working through the day and into the night, measuring, coloring, erasing, Taliesin III
30
begin- ning to take shape under the impress of his pencil while the blackened stone of the walls stood silhouetted against the hills like the ruins of a Roman villa. He’d sit down to dinner and gaze up at her out of his naked face, looking like a Chinese sage with his eyebrows gone and his naturally springy hair slicked back to hide the places where she’d cut out the worst of the burned spots, and there’d be a joke on his lips. Always a joke. He’d clown for Svetlana, sing “O, Susanna” a cappella and wish aloud for a piano to replace the one turned to ash. “Or a banjo, at least. How about a banjo, Svet? Is that one I see on your knee there?”
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begin- ning to take shape under the impress of his pencil while the blackened stone of the walls stood silhouetted against the hills like the ruins of a Roman villa. He’d sit down to dinner and gaze up at her out of his naked face, looking like a Chinese sage with his eyebrows gone and his naturally springy hair slicked back to hide the places where she’d cut out the worst of the burned spots, and there’d be a joke on his lips. Always a joke. He’d clown for Svetlana, sing “O, Susanna” a cappella and wish aloud for a piano to replace the one turned to ash. “Or a banjo, at least. How about a banjo, Svet? Is that one I see on your knee there?”
And he was good with her too on the subject of the fire. Wonderful, really. Far better than Vlademar would have been. Svetlana was a sensitive child, very adult, always concerned with security and order and the underlying causes of things, and the fire had been especially hard on her, the violence of it, the dislocation—and just when she’d begun to settle in and find herself. First she’d been uprooted from Fontainebleau, then from her uncle’s house in New York and from Chicago and Vlademar, and now there was this, her dresses and her books and the indispensable porcelain dolls gone forever.
Frank had come in whistling at lunch one afternoon not a week after the fire, the day gloomy and oppressive, the sky like iron, thunder rumbling, stanchions of lightning propping up the clouds all around them. And that smell, that smell on the air still. “I see you’re in a good mood,” Olgivanna said, pulling out a chair for Svetlana as the cook fussed round the table.
“Oh, sure,” he said, “sure,” lifting his eyebrows, where spikes of white hair had begun to sprout, “is there any other kind of mood worth being in? Huh, Svet? What do you say?”
“There’s lightning,” she said in a very small voice. “Again.”
“Well, it’s a fact of life. Electricity. Without it we’d have no lights at night. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
She didn’t respond, Mrs. Taggertz setting down bowls of soup and a loaf of fresh-baked bread, just the three of them at lunch, the workmen dining separately on the wall beneath the oak trees, the Neutras, Mosers and Tsuchiuras displaced now and gone. A long roll of thunder drummed at the hills.
“Now, listen, Svet,” Frank said, setting his spoon down to reach for the bread knife and saw at the loaf with both hands, “you know perfectly well it wasn’t lightning that caused the fire, but bad wiring. And bad luck, I guess.” He handed her a roughly hewn slice of bread. “But if it wasn’t for the rain, we wouldn’t be sitting here all snug and happy because the whole place would have gone up.”
“I know that. But if it wasn’t for the wind—” She made a vague gesture with her spoon.
“Sure,” he said. “Sure. I know what you’re driving at, honey, and there’s no good answer for it. You take the good with the bad. The main thing is not to let it get you down.” He paused to address the soup, but he wasn’t done yet. “You know, I’ve told your mother this, but I have to say I’m humbled by it too. It does seem sometimes as if some higher power is up there throwing the dice against us—and by that I mean God, the God of the Bible with his manna in one hand and his hellfire in the other. Take Maple, for instance.”
“Who’s Maple?”
“She was a pedigree Holstein Maplecroft worth more than a hundred ordinary cows—we bought her to breed her and start our own line. And one day, during a storm just like this, she was out in the field with two ordinary old milk cows worth not much more than their hides and bones. I was sitting on the stone terrace with a cup of tea, watching the storm come in, when there was a powerful jolt—Boom! Just like that”—he snapped his fingers—“lightning striking right there in the field.” He lifted a finger to point beyond the windows. “Sure enough, ten minutes later a worker came to me breathless to say that one of the cows had been killed—can you guess which one?”
“Maple? ”
“That’s right, honey: Maple. And I tell you, you can draw your own conclusions, but what I say is you’ve got to put your head down and work, work till you add tired to tired, and never look back. Never.”
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It was amazing to see how quickly the ribs of Taliesin III went up, a whole crew of carpenters, stonemasons and laborers from the surrounding villagesgoing at it from dawn till dusk through the cumulative outpouring of each lengthening day, and Frank right there in the middle of it. He was inexhaustible, utterly absorbed, and if he wasn’t climbing the frame with his carpenter’s level or snapping a plumb line from one corner to the next, he was at his desk, refining the plans, firing off letters to prospective clients and old friends, using all his charm and persuasion to secure commissions (retainer urgently requested) and outright loans. Insurance would cover some of the cost of rebuilding, he assured her, though unfortunately—tragically—the art hadn’t been included in the coverage, and the structure he envisioned was far grander than either Taliesin I or II—here was a chance to consolidate things, eliminate the design flaws of a place that had grown by necessity and accretion. Where the money would come from, he couldn’t say, but he never let money stop him, not mere money. Oh, no.
May turned to June, June to July. She hadn’t really put on any weight—or not that anyone could see, except Frank when they were in bed together and he ran his hands over the bulge of her abdomen as if this were another of his projects to be gauged and measured against a set of blueprints—but soon her condition would be evident to anyone with a pair of eyes. Like the cook. Or any of the workmen—or their busy wives. They had a talk about it one night, the two of them naked and sweating and Frank examining her under the lamplight, his face shining, the taste of him on her lips still. “We’ve got to do something before people start talking,” he murmured.
She traced a single finger down his nose to his lips, his chin, his chest. “What,” she said, feeling playful, “exactly, do you propose?”
“Miriam,” he said, and waved a hand in extenuation.
For a long moment she said nothing. The name itself—
Miriam
—was enough to break the mood, sour the sweetness of the moment, and there was that smell again, the faintest whiff of burning. She watched the shadow of his hand move against the wall. Beetles hurled themselves at the window screen like bullets. He’d lain here in bed with Miriam just as he was lying with her, opened himself to her, told her he loved her, swore it, swore it a hundred times. And what was she now? A stranger. An irritant. A name, just a name. “What was she like?” she asked, and her voice seemed to stick in her throat. “Was she beautiful?”
Miriam
—was enough to break the mood, sour the sweetness of the moment, and there was that smell again, the faintest whiff of burning. She watched the shadow of his hand move against the wall. Beetles hurled themselves at the window screen like bullets. He’d lain here in bed with Miriam just as he was lying with her, opened himself to her, told her he loved her, swore it, swore it a hundred times. And what was she now? A stranger. An irritant. A name, just a name. “What was she like?” she asked, and her voice seemed to stick in her throat. “Was she beautiful?”
“No,” he said. “Not compared to you. Nobody is.”
“But she
was
beautiful.”
was
beautiful.”
He shrugged. “Listen, Olya, that’s not the point. I don’t want our child born out of wedlock, that’s all. We need to be married as soon as possible, you see that, don’t you? Before word gets out. You’ve got your divorce, now I’ve got to get mine. I’m going to the lawyer tomorrow, first thing in the morning, all right? And we’ll see what happens. Maybe—as long as she doesn’t know about you, about us—she’ll take the bait and we can be done with her.” He paused, looked to the window, the beetles there—and what were they doing? Mating she supposed, like any other creatures. “She’ll need money, I know her. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll come to terms.”
“Do you love her still?”
“Love her? She’s been dead to me for years. She’s a disturbed woman, violent. Especially if she doesn’t get her way. If she even suspected . . . I mean, that you were here—”
She remembered how he’d fumed over the newspaper accounts of the fire—“So much trash and sensationalism, as if I live my life for the amusement of Mr. and Mrs. Schmutzkopf over breakfast in the Loop, ‘Love Cottage, ’ and all the rest”—but was exultant that none of them had mentioned her. They didn’t know. No one knew. It was their secret,
Architect Living in Sin with Pregnant Montenegrin,
and if they could guard that secret just a while longer, all would be well, he promised her. She hadn’t really thought about it, not until the fire and the clamor of the newspapermen. Everything had seemed so natural to her, so involved with the earth and the change of the seasons, so distant from the city and society and all the dull decorum that went with it. She thought of Georgei then. It was no more than what—eighteen months ago?—that she’d first come to New York with his troupe. She’d been enclosed within him then, all her life a function of her master and his Work, her spirit ascending, the drums and flutes speaking a secret language that fed her limbs as she danced across the stage, danced in private, danced to a music no one else could hear, present only in her mind and her heart—and Georgei’s. How distant it all seemed now.
Architect Living in Sin with Pregnant Montenegrin,
and if they could guard that secret just a while longer, all would be well, he promised her. She hadn’t really thought about it, not until the fire and the clamor of the newspapermen. Everything had seemed so natural to her, so involved with the earth and the change of the seasons, so distant from the city and society and all the dull decorum that went with it. She thought of Georgei then. It was no more than what—eighteen months ago?—that she’d first come to New York with his troupe. She’d been enclosed within him then, all her life a function of her master and his Work, her spirit ascending, the drums and flutes speaking a secret language that fed her limbs as she danced across the stage, danced in private, danced to a music no one else could hear, present only in her mind and her heart—and Georgei’s. How distant it all seemed now.
Georgei. The force of him, the way he could mesmerize an audience. He would sweep out of the wings like a prophet, urging the rapt crowd to lift the veil and see the universe for what it was, and he would astonish them with his music and feats of hypnotism, but the true
coup de foudre
was the moment the dancers broke the plane of the stage and hurled themselves into the audience. It was a leap of faith. They all spun to the accelerating beat of the music and then they rushed the lip of the stage and leapt blindly into space—and it was faith alone that kept them intact even as they landed in the orchestra pit or the boxes in front, sprawled amongst the gentlemen in their fancy dress and the ladies in their gowns. That was the leap she’d made now. For Frank.
coup de foudre
was the moment the dancers broke the plane of the stage and hurled themselves into the audience. It was a leap of faith. They all spun to the accelerating beat of the music and then they rushed the lip of the stage and leapt blindly into space—and it was faith alone that kept them intact even as they landed in the orchestra pit or the boxes in front, sprawled amongst the gentlemen in their fancy dress and the ladies in their gowns. That was the leap she’d made now. For Frank.
“We’ll lie low,” he said, “just as we’ve been doing. And you’re hardly showing.” He touched a hand to her cheek. “You know what I’ll do? I’ll sketch some dresses for you, lots of material, ruffles maybe—I know, I know—but something to hide your condition. As long as possible. Because if word gets out . . .”
But word does get out. Word travels fast, it seeps and bubbles and runs in the ditches like heavy rain in a wet country, and when she began to show, when there was no hiding it anymore and the leaves turned and dropped from the trees and the clouds moved in low to scatter sleet across the new windows and new roofs of Taliesin III, the phone rang again. They were sitting by the fire, she and Svetlana and Frank, reading aloud, and the instrument gave a long trailing bleat and then another. She looked up at him and she saw his eyes retract, his jaw harden: he was thinking the same thing she was. The phone hadn’t rung, not at this hour, in a very long time—not since summer, when he’d filed the divorce papers. Then it rang daily, continually, and the letters came in a deluge—she’d seen those letters, the envelopes addressed in a finishing school hand lost to the fierce accounting of haste and desperation, and inside the chilling avowals of love couched in the iconography of sex and death.
Oh, my gallant knight
—struck out—
once gallant
—struck out again—
never gallant knight who took me to his bed and made of that bed an ancient bark plying the stormy seas of Eros, hard by the Isle of Thanatos and the Peninsula of Despair, how could you betray me? My trust, my heat, my blood, my heart? How could you? How
could
you?
Oh, my gallant knight
—struck out—
once gallant
—struck out again—
never gallant knight who took me to his bed and made of that bed an ancient bark plying the stormy seas of Eros, hard by the Isle of Thanatos and the Peninsula of Despair, how could you betray me? My trust, my heat, my blood, my heart? How could you? How
could
you?
On the third ring he set down the book and rose to answer the phone. She watched him pad across the carpet as if in slow motion, watched him lift the receiver from the hook. Even though she was on the far side of the room and there was a record on the phonograph and the fire was making a noise with a log of too-green wood, she could hear the shrill insinuation of the voice on the other end of the line. “Miriam,” Frank was saying. “No, Miriam, you’re wrong,” and he had to pull the receiver away from his ear.
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