He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his head hanging. “My family has lived in this valley for fifty years. My aunts…”
She shook his shoulders. “Frank,” she said gently. “Frank. Have you talked to Sheriff Pengally yourself?”
“No.”
“Then call him right now, for goodness’ sake.”
LATER, WHEN SHE REMEMBERED these days, she would think of Josiah, lunging and feinting, lunging and feinting. It was the same dance she and Frank had been drawn into as they attempted to make the men disappear. Each day a new development caused one side to retreat, only to lunge forward the next day with some new ploy or response. Pengally confirmed by phone that reporters had been nagging him. They had gone after the district attorney to search the state statutes, but the harried man found nothing to put before a grand jury. “Don’t worry,” the sheriff told Frank, “I’ll shoo them off.” Yet the headlines persisted. SOUL HEGIRA HEADS TOWARD SORDID JAIL. Another called Taliesin a “love jungle.” Another claimed a posse had raided “F. L. Wright’s Den of Love.”
There had been no posse after all. At the time, though, not even the men who worked for Frank knew whether to believe a posse was headed toward Taliesin. During the worst of it, the workmen had brought firearms from home and taken it upon themselves to patrol the perimeter of the property. The thought of these loyal country men, whose lives were rooted in family and church, trying to protecting her and Frank had made Mamah feel grateful and, at the same time, deeply embarrassed.
In despair, Frank wrote another public statement of their position, passed it to the press, then announced that he would ask Catherine and Edwin for a “family caucus” to sign an agreement that everyone was at peace with the situation. The day before New Year’s, as he was preparing to go to Oak Park to get their signatures, the morning newspaper rendered the trip unnecessary. Catherine Wright made it very clear that she knew nothing of a caucus and had no intention of signing anything. “I shall not divorce my husband,” she said, “and I shall not allow him to marry another. He will always be welcome in his home; I shall always be glad to see him.”
Mamah hadn’t heard Catherine’s voice for some time, but this sounded like the woman she once knew. The statement, Mamah felt certain, was meant for her. It dawned on her that the newspapers had become a messenger service between them.
Once again she found herself a character in a morality play, cast by the dailies and watched by the public. Nowhere was that more evident than in an interview with Frank’s former secretary, Grace Majors, that ran the next day. She described Catherine as a woman of not only extraordinary character but great beauty. Radiantly lovely with pink and white coloring, Catherine looked particularly stunning in a chiffon gown Frank had designed for her that matched her auburn hair. When people complimented her on her appearance, according to the secretary, Catherine always said, “The credit for the beauty of this gown is all due Mr. Wright.”
Miss Majors did not remark on Mamah’s looks but did dismiss her as a devotee of Ibsen, whom Mamah regarded as her spiritual and physical director. That part caused Mamah to laugh bitterly. She’d never met the secretary. True, she had read some Ibsen, but to describe him as her spiritual and physical director? What did that even mean?
But it didn’t have to mean anything for readers to catch the message of the article. Catherine is the angel, Mamah thought. And I am the devil.
For a full week the newspaper scandal raged on. A few parents took their children out of Hillside School for fear they would be tainted by the nearness of Taliesin. Clergymen of every stripe from Madison to Chicago railed against Frank and Mamah from their pulpits. The church Mamah had attended in Oak Park dropped her from its rolls.
In the early part of the siege, the reporters had placed the latest papers outside their door, like bait. She and Frank had taken in the papers each day. The reporters got what they wanted—a distressed response that ran the following day.
Now that the workmen were patrolling the property, the papers had stopped appearing. Frank was relieved, but she missed them. Maybe Mrs. Upton Sinclair was strong enough to refuse to read the dailies, but Mamah couldn’t stop herself. The articles were saturated with distortions, but there were nuggets of truth in them, too—correct chronologies, real quotes.
She asked Josiah to bring her any Chicago papers he could get from the train station. He looked at her mournfully. “They’re full of lies,” she said, “but it would be worse to not know what’s being said.”
ON JANUARY 3, a bitter cold seized southwest Wisconsin. They woke to find Lucky’s bowl of water frozen solid in the kitchen. Dressed in layers of wool, Frank cursed the useless furnace and went out to get more wood. She watched through the window as he bent down, gathered snow in his hands, and washed his face with it. He collected an armful of logs, came inside, then started up the stove and built a roaring fire in the living room.
She kept the oven door open until her fingers could function properly. Sitting in the kitchen, Mamah took stock. The stove had unwiped spills on it. In the living room, she’d noticed footprints through gray ashes all around the fireplace. The sheets needed to be changed and the bathroom scrubbed.
When she felt warm enough, she opened the door to see that Josiah had left her a newspaper. They had not had any press for two days, and she’d begun to believe the assault was over. But there in the middle column of the Chicago Journal’s front page, some editor had fired his parting shot.
HEGIRA TEARS CHILD HEARTS
MRS. CHENEY’S OFFSPRING PRAY
SHE MAY RETURN,
BUT ONLY ONE HAS HOPE
Mamah dropped the paper on the kitchen table, crossed her arms, and squeezed her ribs as she read down the column.
The three children of Edwin H. Cheney and Mamah Bouton Borthwick, his divorced wife, have given up hope of having their mother again.
“I guess she is not coming back,” said 9-year-old John today as he plodded from his home to the Holmes School in Oak Park.
“Us three kids pray for her every night, but I guess God can’t hear us, or something, for none of us except Martha believes she will come back.
“Jessie and I have read a lot about her in the newspapers whenever we get a chance, but they keep them away from us most of the time, and there is a lot of it we don’t understand. Martha is too young to read the papers, so she just keeps wishing for Mamma. She talks about her nearly all the time.”
Mamah’s anguished cry brought Frank in from the living room. He read down the column and said, “They’ve made it up. It’s hard to imagine such cruelty, but they’ve put words in John’s mouth.”
“How do you know that?”
“Does he speak like that?”
She looked at him fearfully. “No, but there are some things right in it. The name of Holmes School.”
Mamah read one section after another. CHILDREN TAUNT LITTLE CHENEYS. CHENEY CHILDREN GAIN LOVE OF THEIR AUNT. “They talked to Lizzie,” she said.
“Now I know it’s made up,” Frank said. “She’s never talked to anyone.”
“Read this.” Mamah pointed to a section on the second page, where her portrait once again loomed midpage.
MAMAH BRILLIANT AS A CHILD
“There is really nothing to say,” declared Miss Borthwick. “I educated my sister, I still love her—I couldn’t help doing that; nobody could, because everybody who knows her loves her. And I will be a mother to her children. Mr. Cheney never has uttered a word against his former wife, even to his closest friends, and if he does not condemn her, why should I?
“Mamah was always brilliant, even as a little child, and was mistress of three languages at an age when some children can scarcely construct a correct sentence in their own language. I taught school and paid for her education at Ann Arbor.”
Frank looked up. “Is that true?”
“Yes,” Mamah said, pressing her fingers into her flesh.
“She graduated from that institution with honors. Later Ma
mah became librarian at Port Huron. She was regarded not only as brilliant, but as one of the best-read women in America and an efficient librarian. But there isn’t anything to say.
“All I can do is the woman’s part—that is, do my duty, love and care for my unhappy, misguided sister’s little boy and girl and help them fill the aching void left there to both Mr. Cheney and the children by the absence of the mother.”
“Words in her mouth,” Frank said. “Don’t finish it.”
When he tried to take away the paper, Mamah grabbed it tight and held on. For a moment there was an angry tug-of-war, until Frank let go. Sighing, he walked back into the living room while she read and reread the terrible story.
No, Lizzie didn’t talk that way. But some parts were things only Lizzie and a few others knew. Three languages by kindergarten. That Lizzie had helped pay Mamah’s way through graduate school. And the comment about being well-read. What was missing was the familiar remark Lizzie always added: “So why can’t you remember where you put your glasses?”
Mamah got up and banged pots around in the sink. She could imagine the taunts the children had suffered. For John to have his mother portrayed on the front page as a whore was the cruelest thing she could think of. Children could be hideous on the playground. What did her own pain amount to, compared to what John and Martha and Jessie had endured?
At that moment, if she could have, she would have taken one of the workmen’s guns and shot dead the reporter who had tracked John down to poke at his wounds.
She remembered the moment when they were in Canada, when she had tried to explain to John what divorce meant. He had squirmed out of her arms and slipped away to play. That was the thing about children. Even if John had nodded, even if he had said he understood, he wouldn’t have. He is nine years old, she thought. All he knows is the feeling inside himself, the terrible longing. What could the word “divorce” really mean to a child that young? Or to Martha? The image of the girl waiting, hoping, believing, was horrifying to Mamah. What must it be like for Martha to bear?
She wanted to leap on the next train to Chicago, to hold her children in her arms. She wanted to tell Martha and Jessie over and over that everything would be all right. She was desperate to feel John’s warm, skinny body, to stroke his head and let him know that he meant everything, more than the world itself, to her.
Mamah stood at the kitchen window and considered the driveway. It was a sheet of ice. The car would surely not start. It was too cold and slippery to try to make any real distance on horseback.
But if she did go, if she found a way to get there, who would it serve?
Only me.
She understood something new just then. That the greatest measure of her love would be to leave them alone. To rush back to Oak Park would be to poke her own stick in their wounds, because once the reunion was over, she would leave again. What they needed now, in order to heal, was distance from her and all this drama. They needed a normal household and the steady, present love of Edwin and Louise and Lizzie. And Elinor Millor.
Mamah saw clearly now just what she had lost. She had given up her right to keep her place as the children’s most beloved. The small, daily offices of love that had connected her to the children before—the shoe tying, the hair combing, the nightly storytelling—were no longer hers to claim. How dare she seek from them the comfort that had once so nourished her? To keep them yearning for a mother who was rarely with them, through her own choice, would be to sentence them to whole lifetimes of sorrow.
What she had to do was secure for them some sense of privacy so they could begin to accept that she was not coming home. She would not inflict herself upon them in the flesh. To go see them now, even if she could, would be to visit the press upon them once more.
Instead, she could write to them and pour out her love for them in letters. She could ask their forgiveness. She could try once more to explain. Words lasted longer on paper than when they were spoken into a child’s ear. Someday, she prayed, someday when they are grown, let them understand.
CHAPTER 40
Mamah sat in her study with the new translation of the Taliesin poem on her lap. She had ordered the book months ago as a Christmas gift for Frank. But it had arrived only yesterday, and Christmas was an agonizing memory she preferred not to think of.
It was February, yet she felt they were both still tender as new bruises. Frank had been right. Clients and prospects had fallen away in the wake of the newspaper stories. He had spent a good deal of time since December writing letters to those whose projects were on the drawing board, urging them to stay with him.
To her, he’d shown a despair she’d never seen in him. In the worst of the onslaught, he had entertained the fear that he might actually die at the hands of lynchers. At the end of December, Frank had taken out a fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy, naming Mamah as the beneficiary. He’d talked of it in terms of protecting her, but there was also another part of it, a deep sense of doom—the flipped-over side of his powerful sense of destiny as an artist.
Mamah read a passage of the poem.
I was a hero in trouble:
I was a great current on the slopes:
I was a boat in the destructive spread of the flood:
I was a captive on the cross…
The words would only darken Frank’s outlook. Mamah closed the volume and put it on her shelf. She had to be careful. Maybe in a couple of months she would give it to him. Now it would only cause him to fall deeper into depression.
“I can’t sit around and design indefinitely,” he said more than once during the long days of February. “There are mouths to feed.” He would go out and split wood until he couldn’t lift his arms anymore, then come back inside, still furious.
He needed to build, he would say, slamming more logs into a pile in the living room. Who was he otherwise? He had to have partners in his work, people who would pay for the materials of his art, who would provide themselves and their dreams as material to inspire him. To lose clients meant so much more than losing income. It meant the loss of an essential dynamic. He would continue to design; he couldn’t really stop himself. But to build, to interact with a place and its materials, to make the decisions along the way that breathed life into a space…
It will be a misfortune if the world decides not to receive what I have to give. She was haunted by the words he’d said to the reporters.
At night he brooded aloud in front of the fire, gauging the loyalty of old clients. Darwin Martin. The Littles. The Coonleys. People who’d had the courage in the past to dream along with Frank. They meant more than money to him. They were the true believers, former and current. Now, in his troubled evenings, he tallied his enemies and friends.
“I should have listened to my instincts,” Mamah told him one night. The dog lay on top of her feet beside the fireplace.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Frank said when he saw that she’d brought table scraps from dinner and was sneaking bits of beef to the dog. “He has a bowl.”
“I blame myself.”
Frank waved away the remark. “I thought you believed that woman’s intuition was fiction, anyway.”
She did. The expression annoyed her, as if women didn’t use intelligence and experience—just as men did—to make wise decisions. Frank, even Edwin, had accused her of thinking a thing to death. But sometimes she just listened to her instincts. This time she wished she had listened to what they were telling her: Lock the door and don’t talk. She’d encouraged Frank to speak openly to the newspapermen, then watched in horror as he stepped into a perverse dance with the press. It was as if he couldn’t stop himself once the thing had begun. In the end, it was he who had been made a fool of, more than she.
There was nothing to be done about it. The past month had been a nightmare she wanted to forget. Only one shred of good had come of it. When Anna had returned from Oak Park, she’d taken up residence at her daughter Jennie’s house rather than with Frank
and Mamah.
“What is happening at the office?” Mamah asked him.
“Well, Sherman hasn’t given up on me. He’s going ahead with the house in Glencoe. There are a couple of stalwarts left. Fred is sending out the monograph to the booksellers who ordered it, but it’s very slow-going.” Fred was the office manager in Chicago. She wondered how Frank managed to pay the rent at Orchestra Hall, let alone the young architect, given all his other financial obligations.
“And the children?” she asked him. He had not mentioned them since he’d come back.
“They still hate me some.”
She suspected he was meting out in doses the time he spent with them or reflected on them. It was how she got through a day. To take John’s and Martha’s letters out of her secretary whenever she felt the impulse was too dangerous. She would exist as a useless heap on the floor if she did.
“When do you see them now?”
“It depends on how you mean ‘see.’ In a week I might visit with them once.” He fell quiet.
“Yes?” She put her hand over his on the armrest.
“But there have been times…at night, when it’s dark…I take the train out to Oak Park.”
She waited, listened to the wet wood hiss in the grate.
“The lights are always on, and if I stand on the terrace, I can see them through the windows. Llewellyn and Frances, they’re such wild little things. They’re usually running around. Sometimes I just go stand there and watch them.” He shook his head and fell silent.
OUTSIDE THE WINDOW of her study, the February sky was dove gray. Nothing moved. Even the dry grasses poking up through the snow had ceased shivering in the wind. They were stooped over, frozen stiff by the last ice storm. She put on her glasses and scanned the landscape. Where were the hares she had seen in profusion last fall? Dreaming in their holes, she supposed.