“Pie crusts,” she would say to Frank weeks later when he asked her at what point the men had begun actually conversing with her. It went without explanation, like “harvest.” Frank knew the value of a good pie crust in the Wisconsin countryside. A woman didn’t want to be known for making a bad one. But a woman who could make a really good one—now, that was worth something.
“LAST SUNDAY OUR preacher warned about consorting with people who live in sin. He didn’t name no names, but…”
Mamah stood in the kitchen at the new house. In the days since her arrival, the kitchen had become a higher priority. It had been cleaned up, and she’d found a block of marble for a pastry board. She was rolling out her crusts there when the voices outside the window began. This time she recognized the young one. It belonged to a sweet-faced workman from a town a few miles over, newly married.
“You worry about the damnedest things,” she heard Murphy say in his thick Irish brogue.
“Well, people are talking.”
“You’re gone five days a week from that little girl of yours, Jimmy. She’s over there alone in Mineral Point with all them Cornish stonemasons. I’d be worryin’ about that, if I was you. Any man knows what a new bride wants. A good stiff prick as far-r-r-r as it will go.”
Men laughed wildly out in the yard.
People are talking. It was to be expected. She had slipped into their midst, and not without notice. Frank had purposely resisted introducing her by name, even to Billy. But the men had only to observe how Frank treated her to know she was more than a housekeeper to him. They addressed her as “ma’am,” if they spoke to her at all.
“I’m sorry it has to be this way. You understand, don’t you?” Frank said to her later. “A newspaper story would be disastrous at this point. It’s not just our hides. Aunt Nell and Aunt Jennie are sensitive about publicity, what with their school nearby. I’m sure that’s why they and the rest of the Lloyd Joneses are keeping their distance.”
The locals probably knew there was a stranger among them—a particular stranger. Once, while riding out in the fields on Frank’s horse, Mamah had come upon two farmers cutting across the property. They had stopped to look at her, and she’d pulled her hat down and ridden off rather than greet them, for fear of making her identity known.
There would come a time when she would have to be presented officially in the community. In the back of her mind, she kept hoping that Catherine would agree to a divorce. Then Mamah and Frank would marry, though they both said it was not a necessity. But how much easier it would make life to have that piece of parchment.
For the time being, she avoided any car trips into Spring Green. When she decided work shoes were the only solution for the mud around the construction site, Frank took one of her shoes into town and bought a pair of men’s heavy boots for her.
The second week of her stay at Taliesin, Frank departed for his Chicago office. He had a project on his drawing table, a summerhouse in Minnesota for old clients, the Littles, that would bring in desperately needed money.
He left on a Saturday, so as to visit his children. On Sunday morning Mamah rose to have breakfast with Jennie and her husband Andrew, their children, and Anna Wright. Frank’s mother had avoided Mamah as much as possible, disappearing into her room at the Porters’ house for long periods during the day. Now they sat across the table from each other as Jennie slid eggs onto their plates.
“She won’t eat eggs,” Anna Wright said. She was thin, erect, and stern-looking, with steel-gray hair wrapped in a tight bun at her neck. Everything about her was sour, even her breath.
Mamah realized Anna was talking about her. The woman’s lips were pressed together in a thin line. The puckered skin just below the corners of her mouth was a measure of the offense Anna took at her presence.
“Oh, I will today,” Mamah said quickly.
Anna looked just to the side of her face as she spoke. “There’s too much work not to eat.”
Feeling chastised, Mamah salted and peppered the eggs on her plate.
“I don’t believe in pepper,” Anna said. “Frank won’t touch pepper. It’s bad for the digestion.”
At least she didn’t call me Mrs. Cheney, Mamah later reflected, the way she had the first week whenever Frank was out of earshot.
“Anna, I have changed my name legally to Borthwick,” Mamah told her when it happened the third time. Now the old woman, like the workers, didn’t call her anything.
It didn’t take much cleverness to understand how the Wright family worked. Anna treated Jennie with a matter-of-fact familiarity. But when Frank entered the room, something in her seemed to brighten. She asked him questions as if he were a visiting celebrity, her cheeks—those sagging pockets—lifting at the sight of him.
Mamah knew her to be an intelligent woman, even witty; she had seen her present at the club in Oak Park. That Anna, cofounder of the Nineteenth Century Woman’s Club, “Madame Wright,” as she introduced herself, inhabited her body when Frank appeared. She pampered him, making up special plates of food for him, pointing out articles she’d read and wanted to share with him. And she told endless anecdotes about his childhood while he sat at the table chuckling at the old stories as if he were genuinely amused. Frank’s sisters, Jennie and Maginel, usually appeared as accessories in the tales, yet even Jennie smiled at the old stories.
Frank had grown up among women, and they all adored him. His sisters and Anna—especially Anna—had doted on him since he’d first appeared. Mamah felt like a mature bride coming into a household where the groom has long been the apple of the mother’s eye. It was a new experience, since Edwin’s mother had always deferred to her, for some reason.
Frank had prepared Mamah to be accepted by his mother, but that was clearly wishful thinking on his part. Even Mamah had imagined better relations, though. She had romanticized Anna as a wise mother—the kind of woman who let her child’s temperament and interests guide how she educated him. Having spent only a few hours with Anna, though, she wondered how on earth she was going to tolerate sharing a house with her, for Frank had earmarked one of the bedrooms in their home for his mother.
THE NEXT DAY, Monday, was so humid and witheringly hot, it put everyone in a bad temper. Mamah was making bread and pies when Frank’s mother appeared in the kitchen. She landed a long cold stare on Mamah when she saw her rolling out crust. Anna didn’t believe in sugar except as it could be used in some home remedy, cough syrup, perhaps. She had expressed more than once the notion that “people” harmed others’ health by baking pies and cakes. Mamah had thought the grainy bread would please her, since it was from one of her own recipes. But the old woman gave no sign of approval when she saw it go into the oven.
Anna was boiling coffee when Lil arrived with the day’s supplies from town. When Mamah and the cook carried six boxes of produce into the house, Frank’s mother went straight to the vegetables to examine them.
“You can’t have paid actual money for this terrible cabbage,” she said, her voice as caustic as acid. “It’s full of bugs.”
“It’s all they had,” Lil said. “It’s a Monday. The food came in on Saturday.”
“You didn’t pay full price for that, did you?”
“Yes.”
“You bargain when it’s like this,” Anna snapped, “or you don’t buy it.”
Lil stopped in her tracks. “That’s all there was. What would the men eat if I didn’t buy it?”
Anna didn’t respond. She poked around the boxes further. “What is this?” She held up some onions. “They’re damp, like they’ve been sitting in water.” She picked up a bunch of small turnips with wilted greens. “How did you manage to find old vegetables in September? These have mold on them.”
Lil glared at the old woman. “Then we’ll peel off the skins.”
The remark infuriated Anna, who threw the turnips into the garbage barrel. “Anybody knows the skin’s the most important part.”
Lil’s eyes were puffy little
slits that gave her face a dull look, but Mamah knew she wasn’t stupid. She was like a lot of country women, red-knuckled from a life of soapsuds and bone-grinding work. Tired out, maybe, but not someone you could push over. Lil pulled out the grocery bill from her pocket and slammed it on the counter. “You owe me five dollars.” She met Anna’s seething look with one of her own.
“Well,” Anna replied, “we shall see what Mr. Wright has to say about that. I, for one, don’t reimburse bad judgment.”
Lil took off her apron and threw it on the floor. She stormed out the door and leaped into her truck. Mamah watched as the battered vehicle trailed a funnel cloud of brown dust down the road and out to the highway.
“Good riddance,” Anna muttered when Mamah came back into the kitchen. She put on an old apron and began moving briskly around the stifling room. “We’ll have chicken stew tonight for dinner,” she said with the slightest hint of cheer in her voice. She went out into the dooryard, lifted a hatchet from its hook, then headed for the chicken coop. When she returned a half hour later, she carried six headless carcasses in the sling of her bloody apron, which she held with one hand. A fistful of herbs was in the other. The contretemps with Lil seemed to have elevated her spirits, because she began talking, apparently to Mamah, as she was the only other person in the kitchen.
“People will take advantage of you when they can, even in the country,” Anna said, her voice thick still with a Welsh accent. “Especially if they take you for an outsider.” Anna smirked as she ripped feathers out of the birds. “That woman doesn’t know who she’s talking to.” She wiped sweat off her upper lip with her sleeve. “If she did, she wouldn’t try to get away with that nonsense. She probably got a decent price and is trying to gouge us.”
Mamah cleared her throat and tried to change the subject. “Frank told me your father settled this land.”
Anna looked up from her work and gazed past Mamah’s face again. “My father…” She paused, as if deciding whether to sully her father’s story by telling it to Mamah. “My father had nothing when he came here.” Her head was shaking a little, as if palsied by indignation. “Nothing. Except a wife and passel of children who could work. They were driven out of Wales by religious persecution.”
“They were Unitarian preachers, weren’t they?”
“You couldn’t live by just that. The Lloyd Joneses were farmers, some of them. A hatmaker, my father was. Great men. Brilliant men. But they were misunderstood back in Wales, treated like heretics by their own people. Because they weren’t afraid to think for themselves. My father was forced to leave the village church because he questioned the divinity of Christ. Most doctrines can’t abide questioners. And my father opened his mouth. He spoke what he believed.” She shook her head. “Oh, the persecution he and Mother endured.”
“So they left,” Mamah said.
“My father had a sister in Wisconsin. At first all we had was our hands and backs. One baby didn’t make it—died on the trip out here from New York.” Anna was washing the blood from the apron in cold water. “In time the Lloyd Joneses owned this whole valley.”
Anna went out of the kitchen, leaving the big pot steaming.
THERE WAS NO REASON to expect Frank’s mother to ever come around. Mamah remembered Catherine’s story of her wedding day. Anna Wright had behaved as if she were at a funeral, fainting during the ceremony. She’d been at constant odds with her daughter-in-law ever since. Yet she had stayed near Frank the whole time. When he set off from Wisconsin as a young man to seek his fortune in Chicago, Anna had followed him within a year or so, moving with her two daughters to live nearby. Actually, to be supported by him.
He’d built a house for her on Chicago Avenue next door to his own. She had settled into Oak Park and carved out a life for herself as Madame Wright, mother of the brilliant architect.
It occurred to Mamah that Frank had never been without his mother close by, except for the one year in Europe. For all the adoration Frank enjoyed in his family, he’d been a beast of burden since he was nineteen or twenty. Standing in the kitchen peeling potatoes, Mamah could easily piece together how things had unfolded recently. Anna Wright had come up here and bought this land for Frank because she knew him well enough to see that he wasn’t going to stay with Catherine. Where would that leave her, living next door to the daughter-in-law he had left behind? No, the mother had to throw her lot in with the son once more, out of loyalty, surely, but also because she had no other options.
To judge by what Mamah could glean from Frank’s meager details, Anna Wright had made a bad bet in the one big gamble of her life. When she’d married, she had settled on a widowed preacher with a charming personality and a gift for music. Anna had ended up sending away his children to live with their dead mother’s family once she had her own children with William Wright. But Frank’s father turned out to be a rambling man, skipping across the country from one low-paying congregation to the next. One day when she’d had enough, Anna cut William out of her life. Banished him to an attic bed and stopped taking care of him, prompting him to file for divorce.
How humiliating for a woman like Anna to have to go back to the handouts of her brothers, the ones who owned the land. Following Frank to Chicago, Anna traded one kind of dependency for another. Now, once again, she was in the valley of the God-Almighty Joneses.
Maybe Anna was finding some respite up here after the newspaper scandal. Mamah had seen Anna’s letters to Frank, knew how deeply pained she had been by the public humiliation. To return to her family’s beloved valley, this time owning a piece of it—at least Frank owning a piece of it—must have restored a little dignity for her. And with Jennie only a stone’s throw away, she must have felt satisfaction in at last laying claim to a part of the Jones dynasty.
Back in Berlin, listening to Frank conjure up images of life at Taliesin, Mamah had not inserted Anna Wright into the picture. Now it dawned on her that Madame Wright could be a very present fact in her life, once Taliesin was completed.
WHEN ANNA APPEARED in the kitchen to check on the stew, Mamah tried again. “Frank says you are the one who really led him to architecture.”
“I put pictures of cathedrals on the walls around his crib,” Anna said. She stirred the steaming pot with a slotted spoon. “And, of course, I introduced him to the Froebel building blocks that he played with growing up.”
Mamah remembered a remark Catherine had made at the housewarming party long ago: “His mother takes credit for his genius. It just burns me up.”
“That’s not the usual thing a mother does,” Mamah said solicitously to Anna. “It was quite enlightened.”
“Well, it certainly wasn’t ordinary in 1867, when he was born, but I had a sense from the beginning that this child saw things other people didn’t.”
“Did you say 1867?”
“Yes. In Richland Center.”
Mamah did not press her, but Frank had said he was born in 1869. She studied the woman’s face. Anna must be at least seventy-five, she thought. It’s possible she’s entering senility; that would explain her constant crankiness. Mamah remembered the onset of her grandmother’s forgetfulness, the confusion of time and dates, the bursts of temper. In that moment she felt some tenderness for Anna Wright.
CHAPTER 36
September 1911
Frank Wright—what a joy and a puzzle you are. Evenings and mornings I catch you sitting on the window seat, studying the valley. I know what you are doing. You’re observing the progression of colors as the leaves change. You’re thinking about plum trees and vineyards. About cows on the hillsides. Which ones are the most picturesque? We can’t have just any cows at Taliesin. Oh my, no. “Only black and white Holsteins against these emerald hills,” you tell me.
The next moment you are up on your feet, dragging me down to the river. Never mind dinner. Let’s go fishing. You pull up two fish and you are twelve again.
By day you dash around here looking like a country squire who has fallen into a
pig trough. You sashay out into the middle of construction in your suit, just off the train from Chicago. When you should dress up, you don’t. A couple of weeks ago, when we drove into Spring Green, you actually went into the bank barefoot. I sat in the car, trying to go unnoticed, while you went to see your banker dressed as Huck Finn.
Was that a test? To see if I have the stuff to ride the raft with you? Or were you simply pushing up against the rules because you feel more alive when you have a foe to fight?
You are in the middle of reliving every boyhood fantasy you ever had, Frank. You’ve told me time and again about sitting on this hill after your uncle had worked you near to death in the fields, and dreaming about building a house right in this place. Well, you have done it. You’ve proven yourself.
One of these days I will find the courage to say to you what I write here. That you don’t have to test the loyalty of the people in this place. You are already testing sorely the love of your family by coming here with me. Let us live shoed lives for a while.
Frank was pacing around the kitchen, holding a flyswatter. His eyes followed a large black fly as it circled the kitchen table, then landed on a leftover piece of toast.
“Griffin!” Frank shouted, whacking the fly with such ferocity that the plate slid across the table and would have fallen off had he not grabbed it just in time. He took a moment to swipe the dead fly onto the plate, collect the toast from the floor, and toss the mess into the garbage. In the blink of an eye, he was leaping through the air, hollering, “Harriet Monroe!” Whack. The swatter came down on the kitchen window. When he lifted it, a fat black smudge remained on the glass.