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 did
n’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.
After a time, they walked back up the hill behind the workmen. Out in the courtyard, men stirred sand, lime, and water into a brown “mud” mix. A young plasterer carried a bucket inside and spread some onto a stretch of wall in the living room as an undercoat. While it was drying, Frank went to the car and retrieved some pigments he had bought in the city. He poured ocher and umber in varying amounts in different buckets of plaster, making an array of shades for use on different walls, “depending on the light they get,” he told the plasterer, who had watched the mixing cautiously.
“How will you get the same color again if you don’t measure and write it down?” the plasterer asked. “You’ve got six formulas going there.”
“I don’t have to fall into a vat of dye to know what color it is,” Frank said. “I can look at the shade on the wall and remix it.”
The plasterer raised his eyebrows, impressed.
Mamah spent the rest of the day helping move her boxes into a shed for storage, then cleaning, cleaning, trying to get the dust and debris out of the bedroom they were to sleep in. There were no windows in it yet. “Organic, indeed,” she teased Frank as she made up the bed.
That night when they lay down, Frank put out his arm to hold her. He pointed out Orion’s Belt through the open hole in the wall, then fell almost immediately to sleep. During the night, she got up to use the bucket he had placed by her side of the bed. As she lifted her nightgown to crouch, a bat whipped by within inches of her shoulder. She leaped back into bed and covered her head with the blanket.
Frank turned in his sleep, muttered, “Heigh-ho,” then commenced snoring.
CHAPTER 35
“Well, shit. If that don’t beat all.”
“That’s what he said. She’s the one in charge when he ain’t here.”
“He ain’t here a lot.”
“He’ll be around more now she’s here. She’s a looker.”
“Shit, Murphy, you better not be lookin’.”
Mamah could hear the men moving around in the living room. Something dragged across the wood floor.
“Gad, I overslept.” Frank sat up and swung his legs around. “They don’t know we’re here,” he said as he reached for his trousers.
She grabbed his arm. “Shhh. It’s all right,” she whispered. “Don’t say a word to them.” She knew Billy’s voice but had no faces for the other two.
“I don’t need a woman telling me how to drive a fuckin’ nail.”
Sawing drowned out their voices before they rose again.
“Don’t saw when you’re mad, Billy. You’re gonna cut off another finger.”
“Oh, he ain’t done that in near a month.” Laughter.
“At least my pecker ain’t been cut off, like some I know.”
“THERE ARE THIRTY-SIX of them now,” Jennie Porter said. “It changes up or down, depending on what Frank’s working on. During the week, they sleep in shacks around here, then they go home on weekends.”
The two women stood between the kitchen table and the cooking range. Jennie and her son, Frankie, rolled chunks of beef in flour, then tossed them into sizzling oil in an iron pot. “Frank hired a woman from town to do the cooking, but it’s too much for one person,” Jennie said. “Somebody has to get things half ready for her, so the big meal can go on around one.”
“Frankie,” she said, “show Miz Borthwick where the carrots are, will you?”
That one sentence confirmed what Mamah had suspected. She was the somebody who would be taking over food duty from Jennie.
It was only right, of course. It wasn’t Jennie’s house they were building, Mamah thought as she pulled up carrots and potatoes from the big garden next to the Porters’ house. She didn’t mind the idea of riding herd over the operation, but she knew almost nothing about cooking.
“It’s written down,” Jennie assured her. “All my recipes feed forty now.”
AS A TEN-YEAR-OLD returning to Boone for a visit, Mamah had gone with a cousin and aunt out into the fields during harvest. They rode in a wagon laden with bowls covered by dish towels. When they found the men, they set up the pots and jugs along the back of the wagon so the farmhands could fill their own plates. Mamah remembered her job that day—ladeling stew into tin cups. Even as a young girl, she had been stunned by how much food we
nt into those men’s mouths.
“Harvest” was all her mother had said when Mamah described the scene once she got home. In Iowa everyone knew what that meant—men bent over pulling and hacking, tending horses, working their hands raw. Women doing the same in the kitchen—cooking, cooking, and then cooking some more.
Mamah ran Jennie Porter’s kitchen as if it were harvest time at Taliesin. There were two main meals, not one, as it turned out. The men ate oatmeal for breakfast, with plenty of coffee. At midday they ate heaps of stew and biscuits. At night they consumed another big meal—chicken, mashed potatoes, something green. Seconds of everything, and then dessert.
Lil, the tired-looking Spring Green cook, arrived from town every day with fresh supplies from the grocer. Only occasionally did they raid Jennie’s garden—there weren’t enough potatoes or greens in the plot for so many people. Mamah began dessert before Lil arrived. Usually, it was coconut cake or yellow cake with cocoa frosting, the two items she had mastered as a housewife. She had never been expected—none of the women she knew in Oak Park were expected—to have more than one specialty. A married woman in Mamah’s circle needed to master just one dish to trot out at dinner parties or to deliver to ailing friends. Everything else was done by a cook or house girl.
Lil taught Mamah the subtleties of pie crust—how you forked the lard, salt, and flour into just the right crumbly mix before you added very cold water. How you pressed your left thumb up and your index fingers down to make a handsome crimped edge.
The first week of meals, the workmen hardly spoke to her. Mamah, Lil, and Jennie hung back, watching as the men devoured one large pot of victuals after another. Mamah had placed a glass vase of flowers on the table and was pained by the amused looks the men shot at one another upon discovering the new frivolity. They ate the cakes and grunted their approval nonetheless, always saying “thank you” when they stood up. But that was all.