CHAPTER 11

“When did it start?”

Mattie was sitting up in her bed. For the past few minutes, she had calmly questioned Mamah. Did Edwin know? Did Frank’s wife know? Except for sprigs of frizzy gold hair escaping from barrettes at the sides of her head, she was the picture of composure.

Mattie didn’t shock easily. Lightning had hit her so often that by the time she was ten, she’d grown impervious to surprise. Her mother had died when she was two. Then a brother and sister died, leaving her with one brother, a stepmother, and a father who seemed to shock as little as she did. Mamah had spent a good part of her college career trying to get a rise out of her roommate.

She had no desire to do that now. She paced along one wall of the bedroom, framing and reframing the story. “Our friendship just evolved. He would come over to discuss the plans, and we would end up someplace else entirely, talking about anything. He’s passionate about so many things—education, literature, architecture, music. He loves Bach.”

“Of course.” Mattie’s pale eyelashes blinked.

“He was easy to talk to, and he opened up. His father had died a couple of weeks before Frank started building our house. He mentioned the death one day in passing, though he didn’t seem upset about it. They weren’t close, because his father had left the family when Frank was about six or seven. I think his father’s passing made him reflective, though, because he talked a great deal to me after that.”

“About…”

“About his early years, summers, actually, on his uncle’s farm in southwestern Wisconsin. How he learned to love the prairie and hills there. How he decided to be an architect. And he talked about his marriage to Catherine. It has been bad for a very long time. They simply grew apart—she’s immersed in the children, and he in his work. Well, and so it went. I told him about myself, too.”

Mamah continued to pace, reliving aloud the day she had brought out the box some five years earlier. When she looked at Mattie, she saw her wince.

“You seduced him with little German readers?”

“No, no, it was another two years before…” Mamah collapsed in the chair and buried her face in the sheets at the edge of the bed. “Oh my Lord, Mattie, what a mess I’m in.”

“Whew.” Mattie whistled. “You are.”

“It was so easy to fall into,” Mamah said, shaking her head. “Frank has an immense soul. He’s so…” She smiled to herself. “He’s incredibly gentle. Yet very manly and gallant. Some people think he’s a colossal egoist, but he’s brilliant, and he hates false modesty. With me, though, he’s really very humble. And unpretentious.” Mamah searched her friend’s impassive features. Nothing. “He’s a visionary, Mattie, and he’s going to be famous someday for developing a true American architecture. He refuses to put up junk he hates, no matter how rich you are. He chooses clients as much as they choose him.”

Mattie raised her eyebrows. “Ah, I see how it works,” she said. “He makes you feel as if you’re brilliant for hiring him.”

“It’s not flattery, Mattie. He finds out who you are, the way any good architect does. Your habits and your tastes. He takes you on, and then he teaches you. It’s a process. Pretty soon you start to see the world through new eyes.”

Mattie looked skeptical.

“I know it all sounds like a lot of nonsense to you, but the truth is, he shows you how much better you can live. How much better you can be. You can’t have a conversation with Frank about architecture without it turning toward nature. He says nature is the body of God, and it’s the closest we’re going to get to the Creator in this life.” Mamah’s hands were tracing lines in the air. “Some of his houses look more like trees than boxes. He cantilevers the roof so it spreads its eaves wide like sheltering branches. He even cantilevers terraces out from the house in the same way, if you can picture it. His walls are bands of windows and doors, the most gorgeous stained-glass designs of abstract prairie flowers. All that glass gives you the sense that you’re living free in nature, rather than cut off from it.”

She stood up and paced, her hands still moving. “I wish that you could experience one of his houses. He likes to hide the doorway so you have to find it. He leads you in, then surprises you. He calls it ‘the path of discovery.’”

Mamah paused, remembering vividly the first time she and Edwin went to visit his studio. He had met them out front, where an etched stone plaque in the wall announced CO FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, ARCHITECT, and storklike stone birds stood guard on either side of a recessed portico. A small door on the right opened into a low dark vestibule, with stucco walls of burnished gold and a stained-glass ceiling that let in dim shots of yellow and green light. Ed’s head had barely cleared the glass ceiling. Frank had smiled when Edwin reached up and touched it with his palm.

“Why so low?” Edwin asked.

“Suspense before surprise,” Frank said. “It’s designed for intimacy. So a person who’s, say, five foot seven passes through it comfortably.”

“Your height?” Ed asked.

“Designer’s prerogative,” Frank said with a smile.

When they had walked out of the vestibule into the study at the front of the Wrights’ house, Mamah was struck by the abrupt opening up of space and light, the “surprise” he had alluded to. It was when they went into the studio, though, with its walls soaring two stories up and a balcony suspended by iron chains, that she knew they would hire Frank Lloyd Wright to design a house for them.

Mamah found herself looking out the window now. “If you saw one of his houses,” she said to Mattie, regaining her thread, “you wouldn’t laugh when he talks about the hearth as a sort of altar to the family. It’s the heart of the house.”

“It’s the heart of his dilemma,” Mattie muttered. “The man’s values have flown right out his abstract windows.”

“I know how it sounds. And I see the seduction of it, Mattie. If I appreciate Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, then I am a person of weight and substance. I’m not entirely stupid. I’ve seen the women whose pulses beat faster when he walks into a room. He excites men just as much. He has a way of waking up your cells.”

“Have you mistaken his work for the man?”

“I’m certain I haven’t.”

Mattie’s voice grew tentative as she fiddled with the tatted edge of the sheet. “How long have you been…”

“Intimate?” Mamah looked away. When she looked back, she saw the question in her friend’s eyes. “Martha is Edwin’s child, Mattie.” Mamah felt her face burning.

“I’m sorry, Mame. I don’t mean to make it any worse than it is.”

THE ROOM WAS COOL when Mamah returned. She carried a bowl of soup.

“It’s awkward,” Mattie said, “knowing Edwin so well.”

“I know. It’s terrible. Do you hate me?”

“No, but you terrify me. I guess you always have.”

“Why?”

“You seemed reckless to me back in college—forever getting into arguments about suffrage and all. I was too busy looking for a husband to be arguing with any of the prospects. You never seemed to care.”

“It’s not that I didn’t want to marry. I liked men.”

“Liked them? You were infatuated with someone new every other week.”

“Only in college. Not in Port Huron. My prospects had slimmed down quite a bit by then, if you recall. But yes, I loved the attention in college. Didn’t you? It felt so good.”

“Oh, I was looking for some solid ground in those days. You? You were looking for something else.”

“Well, can you blame me now? It’s wonderful to feel desired. There’s a sense of power in it, really.”

Mattie stirred the soup slowly. “Don’t you see what’s happened? You wanted to be in love again. To feel that feeling where a man you hardly know gazes into your eyes and seems to be the only human being who ever understood the real you.”

“I love this man more deeply than I ever dreamed possible. He loves me. His marriage has been dead for years.”

Mattie narrowed her eyes. “Have you left Edwin?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you moved to Boulder without telling me, my friend? Is that why you wanted me to find you a boardinghouse?”

Mamah shook her head disconsolately. “I don’t know. All I know is that I’m here and I need to figure it out. A person can get a divorce after two years of separation. Maybe I could find work.”

“What happens if you leave Edwin and this man never leaves his family?”

Mamah leaned back and crossed her arms. “Then I shall be living honestly, at least.”

Mattie set down her spoon. “What about the children?”

“That’s the part—”

“How many does he have?”

“Six.”

Mattie flopped back into her pillow. “Have you started the change?”

“No!”

“Well, you surely are acting like it. Women do crazy things. You’ve seen those stories in the paper where a woman leaves her family to become a missionary, or shoots her husband in a fit of rage.”

“I hadn’t considered either.”

Mattie fell into a silence.

“People are divorcing more nowadays,” Mamah said after a while. “It’s not impossible.”

“No, it’s not. But if you think your choices are limited now, imagine being divorced. And who’s to say, if you got your way, you would still love him a year from now? You could end up miserable, without your children.”

“Some women get their children when they divorce. Edwin is furious right now, but given time…”

Mattie swung her legs to the side of the bed and stood up. She put her hands on Mamah’s shoulders. “Pull yourself back long enough to look at it. Take some walks. Get involved out here. In a few weeks you’re going to be saying to yourself, ‘What on earth was I thinking?’”

“But I don’t love Edwin.”

“What about duty? What about honor?” Mattie shook Mamah’s shoulders. “I know you. You wouldn’t take down two families, Mame. You couldn’t live with yourself.”