CHAPTER 38

December 23, 1911

Such a painful “early Christmas” with the children in Chicago last week. Everyone uncomfortable in the hotel room. And then Edwin, suddenly friendly, pulling me aside at the end of my allotted day and a half to confide so happily his secret. He has not even told the children yet that he plans to marry this Elinor Millor woman next August. If she is one of Lizzie’s best friends, how is it I have never once heard mention of her? How magnanimous Edwin thought himself, offering to allow me to have the children an extra month while he is on his honeymoon next summer.

I should feel glad for him. I should be happy when Edwin says she shows only the tenderest concern for the children. Instead, I am ashamed to admit, I feel stupidly betrayed. Replaced, more like it. Cannot think on it much or I will surely go mad.

Frank had his own “holiday”—ate his sliced turkey downtown with his children and Catherine, then took them all shopping. He won’t go back to Oak Park on Christmas Day, says it will only encourage Catherine in her fantasies. So it will be just the two of us here for a quiet Christmas—our first at Taliesin.

Icicles have made the most beautiful, glassy veil around the house. They hang from the roof edge all the way down to the snow on the ground. Frank has hung some Japanese prints and the pictures we bought in Berlin. This place is taking on the feel of a real home. No rugs or much furniture, but here and there he has made assemblages of things from nature—rocks, pine boughs, and branches with berries. So lovely.

         

Mamah noticed the horse first. She was making coffee when she heard neighing outside. The roads had been impassable around Taliesin for the past week, and the workmen came in on horseback now. But today was Saturday, two days before Christmas. Everyone was gone, even Frank’s mother, who had decided to pass the week in Oak Park.

When Mamah went to the door, she found a red-cheeked young man peering in, his fist poised to rap on the glass.

“Good morning,” he called cheerfully. She looked him up and down, opened the door. He was clean and well-spoken. “Is Mr. Wright here?”

“Come in,” she said.

“Say, something smells good.” She couldn’t place his face, but his manner made her think he was a workman’s son come back home for the holiday and looking for work.

“He’s here. I’ll be right back.” Mamah found Frank in front of the fireplace. “There’s someone here to see you.”

Frank got up from his knees and went into the kitchen, wiping his hands on his pants.

“The name is Lester Cowden,” the visitor said, extending his hand. “I’m from the Chicago Journal.”

Frank withdrew his hand. “What is it you want?”

“Sir, we had a report that Mrs. Cheney is living here, and I was sent out to confirm it.” The young man seemed without shame in stating his business.

“I won’t say a word!” Frank shouted. He yanked open the door and pulled the man’s coat sleeve until he was outside. “Go on, get out of here.” He slammed the door and waited until the man had mounted his horse and turned down the driveway. “The invidious sons of bitches,” he muttered.

“I wasn’t thinking. He seemed to know you.”

“Don’t talk to any of them, Mamah. Don’t let anyone you don’t know into this house.”

Later that afternoon, while Frank was out in the barn tending to the horses, the telephone rang.

“Mamah?” A man’s voice. “Mrs. Cheney?”

She hung up, threw on her coat, and went to the barn to tell Frank.

“The vermin are back,” he said.

         

THEY HALFHEARTEDLY ate the lamb and greens she had cooked that night. When the phone jangled again, they both started. Frank got up and answered it. “All right,” he said. “Just read it to me.”

Mamah knew this meant a telegram. That was how they had to handle telegrams sent to them at Taliesin, unless they wanted to travel into the train station in Spring Green. It was an unsatisfactory system for all purposes, business and personal, as the telegraph office was patched through by the telephone operator on a rural party line. “You might as well just put an ad in the Weekly Home News,” Frank would grumble after such a transaction.

“The Chicago Tribune, you say, not the Journal?” He was pressing a finger against his free ear. “No. No. Wait a minute, Selma. Just a minute.” He looked over at Mamah. “The Tribune’s on to it now. What do you want to do?”

Mamah bit down on the inside of her cheek. “Call them back later.”

“I’ll call you back, Selma…What is it? Well, I don’t give a damn about their deadline.” Frank hung up the receiver and slumped into a chair.

“So they all know I’m here,” she said.

“It was only a matter of time.”

“Now what?”

“Just carry on with our lives. You can’t let them rattle your footings every time they show up.”

“Why don’t you say some small thing, Frank? Tell them I’m divorced. Say we are living quietly together and wish not to be disturbed. Something like that. Then they’ve gotten their quote and it’s over with.”

He picked up the phone and called the telegraph office. “It’s Frank Wright,” he said. “Look, about that telegram from the Tribune. Just send one back to them from me. Say this: ‘Let there be no misunderstanding. A Mrs. E. H. Cheney never existed for me and now is no more, in fact. But Mamah Borthwick is here, and I intend to take care of her.’”

Frank listened to the woman on the other end reading it back to him. “B-O-R-T-H-W-I-C-K,” he said. “No, that’s all. Just sign my whole name.”

The next day Frank stood at the window of her study, brooding and waiting. From where he was positioned, he had a commanding view of the driveway. At ten o’clock, a party of three men on horseback turned off the highway and rode toward the house.

“Stay here,” Frank instructed her.

When the knock came at the kitchen door, he answered it. The men included the reporter from the Journal, one from the Chicago Record Herald, and the other from the Tribune. The Journal reporter had been chosen spokesman.

Mamah crept down the hall to better hear what they were saying.

“Not a man here wants to be spending his holiday this way, Mr. Wright. Personally, you have our respect and sympathy. But the fact is, the editors think the only way to sell papers is with sensational news stories. That’s what the people want.”

“I won’t be a part of it,” Frank said.

“Sir, you already are. Here are today’s papers.”

She heard Frank cursing.

“Mr. Wright, why don’t you tell your side of the story? I honestly think people would be sympathetic, and it could put an end to this.”

“That’s right,” the other ones said.

She heard the door shut hard, and watched Frank walk disconsolately into the living room carrying the newspapers. When she joined him and picked up the top paper on the stack, it was ice-cold. Like a familiar bad dream, there was her portrait on the front page of the Journal. Next to her head, black letters shouted the “news.”

         

MRS. CHENEY AND WRIGHT ELOPE AGAIN

FAMOUS CHICAGO ARCHITECT LIVES WITH

DIVORCEE IN SECLUSION AT HILLSIDE, WIS.;

LEAVES WIFE AT HOME

FORGIVEN AFTER FIRST ESCAPADE,

HE NOW TACKS RENT SIGN ON RESIDENCE

         

She looked at the Sunday Chicago Tribune. Running down the middle of the front page was a similar headline. Mamah shuddered as she read accounts of their love affair rehashed from two years before. But the Tribune, on a tip, had gone to the office of the Wrights’ lawyer, Sherman Booth, and had come upon Catherine, who insisted that the woman up in Wisconsin was Frank’s mother and not Mamah. Asked about the wall Frank had built between the studio and the house, Catherine insisted Frank was renting out one part of the house because he thought it had become too large.

It occurred to Mamah that Catherine might be mentally unstable. Why else would she carry on with this fiction?

“The bastards bushwhacked my daughter,” Frank growled. His voice was murderous.

Mamah read the paragraph he pointed to in the Tribune.

At the bungalow, Wright’s 17-year-old daughter met all inquiries with the flat statement, “We have nothing to say.” When shown a copy of the report exploiting her father’s latest fall from grace she seemed surprised and amused.

“We have become hardened to the sensational features of this case,” she said, finally with a smile, “and we really don’t pay much attention, one way or the other. Just say for Mr. Wright and Mrs. Wright, and all the little Wrights, that we don’t know anything about this awful story, and that it must be untrue.”

It was young Catherine’s bravado in the last paragraph that pierced Mamah’s heart. She remembered the pretty blond girl as deeply shy.

“Frank, are your children really expecting you for Christmas?”

“I made it very clear to Catherine that I would not be back there for Christmas.”

“But did you tell your children?”

Frank threw up his hands. “I have tried to talk with my children.”

“Catherine does know you live with me here, right? She doesn’t actually believe you built this house for your mother—”

“Oh, for Chrissakes. Of course not. She’s pulling us all down with her insanity. There won’t be a client left after all this.”

Mamah looked through the kitchen window and confirmed what she suspected: the reporters had not left. “Come sit down with me for a minute,” she said when she returned. “Let’s think this out together. I believe the reporter could be right. There’s a part of me that feels we should lock the door and never speak to those people again. But I keep thinking maybe it’s time to tell our side of the story once and for all.” Now it was Mamah who paced. “Just imagine for a minute what would happen if we dignified this whole witch hunt with an explanation spoken from our hearts. I believe it would help.”

“You think rather highly of the man on the street.”

“Seriously, how many times have we talked about exposing people to Ellen’s ideals—our ideals? If I stand up on a podium and talk about living an honest, authentic life, no newspaper is going to cover it. But now, at this moment, in the context of this absurd situation, it may be the one chance we get to explain ourselves.”

“Beat them at their own game?”

“I don’t want to use Ellen’s name at all. It would be our own thoughts.”

Frank sat for a while, considering, then got up and went into the kitchen. Mamah could hear the relief in the reporters’ voices as they piled through the kitchen door. They were probably nearly frozen. “Come back tomorrow,” she could hear Frank telling them. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Be here at ten.” He let them stay for a few minutes to warm themselves, then sent them packing.

“Do you think it’s wise to have them come back on Christmas Day?” she asked when they were gone. “Maybe we should wait until the day after.”

“If we’re going to talk, we can’t take the hand railing down the stair on this. If it means a press conference on Christmas Day, then so be it.”

         

DURING THE AFTERNOON and into the late evening, they struggled to put words on paper.

“I’ll talk,” he said. “They’ll crucify you if you speak out.”

He was trying to protect her. When she looked at him sitting there with his arms crossed, she knew he would not be budged on this point. “Then say I am in accord with all your remarks.”

“Agreed.”

He read the sentences to her as he composed, and Mamah was the editor, responding to the words he had chosen about squaring one’s life with one’s self. By nine o’clock Frank was depleted. In bed, she stared into the dark, waiting for the blankness of sleep.

In the morning Frank built fires and bathed. He emerged from the bathroom wearing his bright red robe over a white shirt and pajama bottoms. “We’re going to have Christmas, even if it’s for ten minutes,” he said. She bathed, dressed, and hurried down the hall. There wasn’t much time before the reporters were scheduled to arrive. When she saw a gift waiting for her under the tree, she dashed back and pulled from beneath the bed the wrapped picture album she’d made for him.

They took their ten minutes, he studying her photo story of Taliesin, she examining the Genroku kimono he’d bought for her. It was exquisitely dyed and embroidered with pine trees, wisteria, and jagged rocks.

She carried it back to their bedroom and laid it out on the bed. On any other Christmas morning, she would have put it on to please him. And to please herself, really. She hesitated, then held it up and viewed herself in front of the long closet mirror. In the space of a few seconds, she was pulling off her dress and wrapping the kimono around herself.

In the kitchen she made two pots of coffee, briefly considered biscuits, and then thought better of it. She was not willing to stoop that low.

Frank sat at the table while she prepared oatmeal, poring over the Christmas Day newspapers Jennie’s husband, Andrew, had brought from the Spring Green train station that morning. “Thank God for Mrs. Upton Sinclair,” he said. “She’s knocked us off the front page.”

Mamah looked over his shoulder. There was a portrait of the unfortunate woman next to a headline that read, AFFINITY OF POET DECLARES SHE WANTS ONLY FREEDOM IN HER ACTIONS. Mamah cringed at the word affinity. The yellow journals had turned a lovely word into a weapon—a code for “ridiculous whore.”

“Atta girl,” Frank muttered.

“What is it?”

“She let ’em have it. Listen. ‘ “I don’t give a d—about marriage, divorce, reports of courts or the findings of referees,” declared Mrs. Upton Sinclair, wife of the novelist. “I am so exhausted by the worries of the divorce suit that I have decided to live my own life with Harry Kemp as I see fit. Here we are hid away in a little insignificant bungalow, away from the outside world…. It is here in the wilds with our sacred feelings in perfect accord….” ’” Frank looked up at Mamah. “Dear God, did all these hack writers go to the same lousy school?”

“No one talks like that,” Mamah said. “No one says, ‘Here we are hid away in a little insignificant bungalow.’”

“Didn’t you know? All affinities talk alike. And they all live in bungalows. It’s the only way the editors will have it.”

“I think she’s made a mistake.”

“Mrs. Sinclair?”

“To come out swinging like that. I understand it, but there’s a more dignified way.” Mamah went and retrieved the notes they had composed the night before. “Do it as we said, darling, will you?” she said, handing him the paper.

“I’m no good at recitation.” He sighed, but when he saw her worried look, he muttered, “All right. I’ll read the darn thing.”

At ten there were six reporters gathered around the fireplace, from papers in Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, and Spring Green. For reporters who were supposed to be fiercely competitive, the men were behaving like old chums. They seemed to have formed a quick camaraderie, the way travelers do when they find themselves thrown together in a strange place. Frank assumed a position in front of them, standing in his long red robe with one arm propped on the hearth. When Mamah entered the room, they turned en masse, then jotted madly in their notebooks. Mamah took a chair as Frank began to speak.

“In the first place, I haven’t abandoned my children or deserted any woman, nor have I eloped with any man’s wife. There has been nothing clandestine about this affair in any of its aspects. I have been trying to live honestly. I have been living honestly.

“Mrs. E. H. Cheney never existed for me. She was always Mamah Borthwick to me, an individual separate and distinct, who was not any man’s possession.”

Frank glanced toward Mamah, and she nodded in return. He seemed to be in full command of his faculties, almost glad to be in front of an audience.

“The children, my children, are as well provided for as they ever were. I love them as much as any father could, but I suppose I haven’t been a good father to them.

“Certainly, I regard it as a tragedy that things should have come about as they have, but I could not act differently if I had it all to do over again. Mrs. Wright wanted children, loved children, and understood children. She had her life in them. She played with them and enjoyed them. But…I found my life in my work.”

Frank set down his notes on the hearth. “You see, I started out to give expression to certain ideals in architecture. I wanted to create something organic—something sound and wholesome. American in spirit and beautiful if might be. I think I have succeeded in that. In a way, my buildings are my children.”

Mamah winced. She knew what he meant, but the newspaper readers would not, she was certain. And how would his children feel, reading it? She cleared her throat. Frank looked over at her, then continued on.

“If I could have put aside the desire to live my life as I build my buildings—from within outward—if I could have persuaded myself that human beings are benefited by the sacrifices others make for them…if I could have lied to myself, I might have been able to stay.”

The Journal reporter jumped in. “How can you justify leaving when you have children?”

Frank kept his calm. “I believe we can’t be useful to the progress of society without a stubborn selfhood…. I wanted to be honestly myself first and take care of everything else afterward. I can do better by my children now than I could have done had I sacrificed that which was life itself to me. I believe in them, but no parent can live his children’s lives for them. More are ruined that way than saved. I don’t want to be a pattern for them. I want them to have room in which to grow up to be themselves.

“I have taken nothing and shall take nothing from them. My earning capacity is as rightfully at their service as ever. I hope to be something helpful and suggestive of better things to them. When they get a little older, I hope they will see me in another light.”

“And Mrs. Wright?”

“Mrs. Wright has a soul of her own and much greater matters than this to occupy her heart and mind. It’s not for me to say what she may do.”

Frank looked away, thoughtful, then turned his face to the men again. “Look,” he said, “it will be a waste of something socially precious if this thing robs me of my work. I have struggled to express something real in American architecture. I have something to give. It will be a misfortune if the world decides not to receive what I have to give.

“As for the general aspect of this thing, I want to say this: Laws and rules are made for the average man.”

Mamah stood up abruptly. She knew what was coming next. She tried to get his attention, but Frank kept talking.

“The ordinary man cannot live without rules to guide his conduct. It is infinitely more difficult to live without rules, but that is what the really honest, sincere, thinking man is compelled to do. And I think when a man has displayed some spiritual power, has given concrete evidence of his ability to see and to feel the higher and better things of life, we ought to go slow in deciding that he has acted badly.”

Mamah glared at him. Had he not heard what she’d said to him this morning? That nothing made better copy than someone who thinks himself more important than the common man? It was like throwing meat to lions.

“That’s all I care to say to you, gentlemen,” he said when she finally caught his eye. “If you want to see what I have done here, I’ll take you around Taliesin.”

While Frank went to change his clothes, the men stood waiting in the foyer. She could tell he was keeping them waiting on purpose, probably to prevent them from making their deadlines. Mamah collected coffee cups and stood on the other side of the wall to listen.

At first they didn’t speak, and then she heard their schoolboy snickers. She stood frozen, listening. She heard “kimono” and “red” as their titters escalated to choked laughter.

Mamah hurried out into the kitchen.

“I thought the interview went rather well,” Frank said quietly to her when he appeared at last.

She looked at him standing there with his regal bearing in the suit he had designed for himself. She saw him then as the reporters had viewed him—an eccentric figure of a man, all too self-serious. She knew at that moment that they would not be spared.

“Just get rid of them,” she said.