Mamah composed herself and walked out to the living room. The workmen were filing into the house now, then down the hall to the room on the west end where they took their lunch. Mamah looked at their expressions. None of them revealed the discomfort she felt inside about Julian. They were joshing one another, as usual.
Suddenly, Julian was standing next to her, ready to seat her. She wanted to get through lunch without another confrontation with the man, then she would go talk to Billy. She’d ask him to take the Carltons into town this afternoon so they would be gone when she returned from the Bartons’. There are six men out there, counting Ernest and the new draftsman, she reassured herself again.
“I can seat myself,” Mamah said to Julian. She walked through the family dining room and out to the screened porch where the children were already seated. It was their favorite place for meals in the summer. When she joined them, she felt the mildest breeze coming up from the river and over the pond. Mamah wiped her forehead with the napkin before she put it on her lap.
While they waited for their food, she tried to explain threshing to Martha and John. How to make sense of the fan belts and gears and pulleys, the smoke-spewing engines?
“It removes the grain from the stalks,” she said. “They belt the threshing machine up to a steam engine—”
She looked up to see Julian, walking through the dark dining room with a tray held high in one hand. In the other, he carried what looked like a bucket. Her stomach tightened. Now what? she thought, sliding on her glasses. As he approached the porch, light fell on his face. His eyes, wide open, had the feral look of a shot deer. Something—urine?—soaked the front of his pants. It hit her. She was looking at a madman.
Her heart hammered as she watched him stop, set down the tray, and lift something. In that instant the object came into focus. A shingling ax, blade glinting, waved in the man’s hand.
“Run!” Mamah screamed to the children. Outside, she heard a sound like a slamming door. In an instant, flames whooshed in a line around the walls of the porch. She smelled gasoline and knew. Her neck and chest heaved as a wave of strength rose in her body.
“Run!” she screamed. John jumped to his feet. She saw Martha leap up as smoke began to pour through the screens.
Julian hurtled toward them, the unbuttoned white jacket hanging half off. “Whore!” he shouted.
Mamah was on her feet, wedged between the table and chair. “Stop!” Her wail rose through the crackling sound of burning wood.
Julian was upon her. Grabbing her throat. Hands reeking of gasoline. “Whore!” He was screaming, eyes insane. “Whore!”
Mamah grabbed the arm wielding the ax. The top of her body whipped back and forth as she struggled to pull him over. His body was iron, and he shook her off. She fell back into the chair. Gasoline from the bucket splashed over her head.
“Die!” he roared. “Burn!”
Both his hands were on the ax, and he raised it in an arc above his head. John clung to the man’s leg, trying to pull him over. Mamah leaped up again, reached out her left arm to shield her son with it. Her right hand rose in the air, and her head tilted back. She saw the blade above her, the honed edge a black line hovering, then blurring, thudding.
Mamah staggered backward and crumpled to the floor. Blood blinded her eyes. In her ears, behind the roar, she heard John’s voice crying out for her. She crawled toward it.
CHAPTER 52
“Come on down, John, you can’t do both.” Frank Lloyd Wright is standing in the tavern room at Midway Gardens, looking up at his second son, who is kneeling on scaffolding. The young man is eating a sandwich with one hand and painting in the circles of the new mural with the other.
“Can you see the lines well enough to tell?” John asks.
“I can tell,” Frank says, leaning on the glass-topped cigar stand in the tavern. “This is the right design.”
Frank is relieved to have the previous half-finished painting covered over. It had driven him crazy, its Greek-robed figures entirely out of sympathy with the rest of the Gardens, its scale absurdly grand. He has designed the new mural to be circles intersecting circles, like bubbles or balloons floating up into the air. Light. Airy. Abstract. Festive.
Frank is hungry. He needs a bath. They both do. He and John have been sleeping at Midway Gardens on a pile of wood shavings covered by a tarp for a couple of nights.
The money is all gone. Everyone in the place is working on credit. The mural is one of the last things they can complete without more funds. Ed Waller can’t understand why Frank would want to paint over a dandy mural by some of the city’s finest painters. But Waller has come to understand that he can’t move Frank Wright off his toehold the way he can the others. Waller has too much at stake to dwell on a painting, anyway. Creditors are screaming. The boat has to float whether it’s done or not.
Opening night of the Gardens reappears in its full glory for the hundredth time in Frank’s mind. Sweet vindication. He can see Harriet Monroe’s face as her eyes move up the balcony tiers, as she scans the hordes in glittering evening gowns, swaying to the orchestra’s music.
“Brilliant” was the word she’d used. “This elevates Chicago architecture to a new level.”
Mamah had turned to Frank with a wry smile after the dreaded art critic wandered off. “One less fly to swat,” she’d said.
“Telephone, Mr. Wright.” A fellow from Waller’s office snaps Frank from his reverie.
He looks up at John. “Come down here, son, and eat your lunch properly.”
Frank and Waller’s assistant walk through the winter garden, then descend the stairs to a basement office.
“Wright here,” he says into the receiver.
“Frank,” a voice says.
It sounds like his friend Frank Roth in Madison. Why is he calling here?
Frank laughs. “Say, you old coot! How are you?”
His friend hesitates. “Frank,” he starts again. “Has anyone called you? There’s a fire going over at your house.”
“What? What’s happening?”
“Something terrible…”
“Where is Mamah? Was anybody inside?”
“I don’t know. I’ve only just heard of it from a friend who works at the newspaper. Have you not had a telegram?”
“No! Is it bad?”
“I think it’s big.”
“I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
Frank hangs up and calls Mamah. He waits but gets only clicking sounds, not even an operator. He hurls the receiver and runs through the building. When he reaches John, he can barely breathe.
“What is it?” his son calls to him.
Frank grips a table and groans. “Taliesin is burning.”
THEY HAIL A TAXI to Union Station and race to Gate 5, the same gate he always goes to when he returns to Spring Green. But it is nearly two P.M.
“It’s a local,” a porter tells them.
“Ahh,” Frank cries out. “Nothing else?”
“No, sir.”
Frank knows the train. He has taken the local before and sworn off it. It stops at every damn puddle between Chicago and Madison. It will be ten P.M. by the time they get there.
“There’s no choice at this point, Dad,” John says grimly.
Frank stares at the throng of people ahead of them. He and John probably won’t even be able to get seats together by the time they get on. The people are sluggish as they climb aboard. They carry shopping bags, suitcases, children. A man in the crowd turns his head and looks straight at Frank. It is Edwin Cheney.
Frank walks over to him. Cheney’s face is white, his lips almost blue. “Ed,” Frank says grimly, grasping his hand. “What do you know?”
“They called me and said there’s a big fire. My kids are there.”
“I know.”
John Wright has pushed his way to the front of the line. He is talking intensely to the conductor up ahead. Heads turn back to look at the two men behind them. John waves to his father and Edwin to come
forward. People in line look at them, annoyed, as they push to the front and are pulled up the stairs by the conductor.
Edwin collapses on one seat, Frank on the other. John works at getting their briefcases stowed overhead.
“They would be outside.” Edwin’s words are half question, half declaration.
“I’m sure of it,” Frank replies. “They’re probably over at the Bartons’ house. It’s threshing time.” He looks at Edwin. “Even if they were in the house, there are doors all around.”
It is another twenty minutes before the train chugs out of the station. It rattles north through Chicago’s suburbs as if it is a vacation excursion train. Within an hour, it makes its first stop. Now it will slow and stop, slow and stop, the rest of the way as it takes on and lets off people in the prairie towns of southern Wisconsin.
The compartment is stifling. The men get up in turn to remove their jackets in the cramped space. Across from Frank, Edwin is drenched in sweat, his heavy face a mask of worry. He has spread into a thick older man with a large round head. From time to time, the train jolts and Edwin’s knees bump into Frank’s.
Somewhere after Beloit, a man taps at the window of the compartment. John cracks the door open.
“Milwaukee Journal,” Frank hears him say.
“Go away,” John says.
“Wait.” Edwin is on his feet. “Ask him what he knows.”
John opens the door. The man glances at the faces in the compartment and rests his eyes on Frank. Recognition flashes across his face: This is the man he was assigned to find.
“What do you know?” Frank growls.
“The editor told me the house has been burning for a couple of hours. The Spring Green fire department is over there. And a lot of others are trying to put it out.”
“What about the people? Was anybody inside?”
The man appears puzzled. He shifts uncomfortably, from foot to foot. He expected to be the observer, the asker of questions, not the bearer of news.
“Last I heard was two hours ago.” He looks at the three faces in the compartment. “There’s some dead,” he says.
Edwin reaches out and grabs the man’s lapels with both hands. “Who? Who is dead?”
Now it is fear on the man’s face. “I heard there were three murdered.”
“Murdered?” Frank cries out in disbelief. “Someone set it?”
The reporter looks around and swallows hard. “The Negro. The servant. Bolted the doors shut all around, they think. Poured gasoline along the perimeter of the wing where they were all having lunch. I guess it went up—” he snaps his fingers—“just like that. When they all came running out the one door he didn’t secure, he axed them. Then he got away. They’re looking for him.”
The man is trying to back out of the compartment. Frank is frantic and has him by the sleeve. “The woman of the house,” he says. “Mamah.”
The reporter looks horrified and hesitates. “I was told, sir, that she was…She has passed.”
Frank sways and falls back on the seat.
Edwin lurches forward and grabs his other sleeve. “Her two children are staying up at that house. A boy and a girl…they are my children….”
The reporter hangs his head. “They can’t find the boy, sir. The girl…I guess she’s burned pretty bad.”
Edwin Cheney cries out and slams his fist into the wall of the compartment. His body shakes with sobs. In the corner, Frank’s arms and legs have begun to shiver furiously. John throws his jacket across his father’s lap.
HOT AIR BLOWS in the window. Flies swarm around the compartment as the train creeps into the Madison station. Down the platform, in the light of a lamp, Frank sees his two aunts, Nell and Jennie, along with his cousin Richard.
“They’ve come to pick us up,” John says. He helps his father stand.
Passengers in the aisles are not moving yet. The three men stand and wait.
“Extra!” a newsboy on the platform shouts. Edwin pulls coins from his pocket, leans out the window, and buys a Wisconsin State Journal from the boy, who strains to hand it up. Edwin unfolds it and holds it up for Frank to read, too. “Negro Maniac Kills Three and Burns Home of Frank Lloyd Wright.”
Frank’s eyes dart to the list of names in the column below.
“The Dead: Mrs. Mamah Borthwick, whose head was cleft in twain, plus Two Caretakers. The Wounded: The 9-year-old daughter of Mrs. Borthwick, who was axed in the head and badly burned. The Missing: 12-year-old son of Mrs. Borthwick, possibly kidnapped. Also missing is Julian Carlton, the murderer.
Frank’s knees buckle as he comes down the steps onto the platform. His cousin Richard grabs him and shakes him hard. “Brace up,” he says, shouting as if Frank cannot hear him. “It’s bad out there, as bad as it gets. Get a grip on yourself.” Richard leads the men to his car.
“They found my son?” Edwin asks from the backseat of the automobile. He is dazed-looking.
“No,” Richard says. “He was in the house, they say. The kidnapping business is all speculation, because Carlton is missing, too.”
“Martha, my daughter?”
“I’m deeply sorry, Mr. Cheney.” Richard chokes, struggles to keep speaking. “She died this afternoon.”
Frank cannot see Edwin Cheney’s face. “Who else?” Frank asks after a time, weeping.
“A thirteen-year-old boy. Ernest Weston.”
“Billy’s son,” Frank says numbly. “He was helping in the garden. What about Billy?”
“He’s injured but alive.”
“And a draftsman,” Richard says. “A draftsman died.”
“Brodelle? Emil Brodelle?”
“Yes.”
On the drive to Taliesin in the darkness, the hills appear as they always do in August, great dark curves beneath a banner of twinkling stars. As the auto approaches the house, the stars disappear in a shroud of smoke. On the ground, hundreds of lanterns flicker. When the car comes around a bend, Frank can see, even in the darkness, that half the house is missing. Smoke clouds waft up from the black scar in the hillside. The auto turns off the highway, and he sees men with rifles and hounds walking down the road, heading away from Taliesin.
Later, he will learn that seven hundred people came to help. Men left their tractors and threshers to rush over to Taliesin. Women ran out of their kitchens with pots and buckets to fight the fire.
The hunt through the cornfields is finished, though Frank does not know this yet. Neighbors and lawmen have already found Julian Carlton hiding in the basement furnace, mute and weak from having drunk muriatic acid. Sheriff Pengally has already saved the madman from a crowd bent on lynching. What Frank sees now are the tired and dirty faces of his neighbors, illuminated by their lanterns, as they walk home to their farms.
In time to come, Frank will try to erase from his mind the things he is about to see at his sister Jennie’s house, where the dead and injured have been carried: Mamah’s body when he pulls away the sheet—her skull split down the middle, her hair burned away, her blistered flesh hanging from bone; Martha Cheney’s lifeless burned body, the sapphire ring the only recognizable thing about her; the hideously injured bodies of Tom Brunker and David Lindblom, still clinging to life but unconscious. Later, he will think of battlegrounds when he remembers Taliesin as he is about to find it. He will struggle to push from his mind the anguish of what Edwin will do tomorrow morning—claw through the smoldering rubble with his bare hands, looking for proof, looking for the bones of his son. By tomorrow noon he will have found them.
CHAPTER 53
Frank awakens confused about where he is. He is lying on his side, curled into a ball on the hill, his ear on the ground thumping with his heartbeat. He smells the green odor of wet grass, feels the blades that were pressed into his skin pull away from his cheek when he sits up. The arm on which his body has rested during the night is numb. He unbends it and shakes it until it tingles.
Consciousness flows into him like the blood pushing into his arm. He sees Jennie
’s house and knows he has slept the night in the pasture nearby. That thought completes itself before another replaces it.
Mamah is dead.
Frank remembers the night before, lying down briefly in his sister’s guest bedroom. Below it, the dining room has become an infirmary where the men injured fighting the fire rest on cots. When he first came into the house last night, he went to Mamah first. Then to Tom and David, who he could see were dying before his eyes. At the cot of each man who had so bravely fought the fire, he knelt down and thanked him for his courage. One neighbor, a man he didn’t know, put his hand out and touched Frank’s shoulder tenderly, as if in benediction.
In the night the sound of their suffering floated up the staircase to his room and drove him from it. It was not only the moans but the knowledge that in the living room below him, Mamah’s body lay on the floor, covered with a sheet. Next to her was Martha, covered as well. When he descended the stairs in the middle of the night, he stood outside the living room, wanting to go in and sit with them. But a terrible fear seized him that if he went into that room, if he saw Mamah again as he had a few hours earlier, he would never again be able to remember her any other way.
As he watches the sun rise, what grieves him is that he failed her. He thinks of the terror she felt. They tell him it was quick, as if that will somehow confine the horror. For the hundredth time, Frank imagines how it might have turned out if he had been there. He sees himself grabbing the legs of Julian Carlton, pulling him over, wresting the ax from his hand as the others run.
The grass’s fragrance gives way to the smell of smoke. It’s in the air, his clothes, his hair. His throat is full of it. He coughs and coughs, then stands up, certain that if he doesn’t put his mind elsewhere, he will smell burned flesh again. He will be retching and useless all day.
People are still asleep in Jennie’s house when he goes in the front door. He climbs the stairs to her bathroom and draws only an inch or two of water. There will be others who will need hot water this morning. Sitting in the tub, he feels the weight of it all like a sack of rocks on his chest. His arms and legs are so heavy, he wonders how he will get out of the bathtub. Yet he must dress and go make a coffin for Mamah.