The Women: A Novel Part 26

161.

It may seem surprising just how much respect was accorded the press during Wrieto-San's time, given its reputation today. But journalism was considered a high calling in those bygone days and the public's right to know seemed to trump even a true American original's right to privacy. Still, I fail to see why Wrieto-San didn't give the reporter what is commonly known as "the b.u.m's rush" and jerk the telephone cable from the wall. Could anyone have blamed him if he had?

162.

An unfortunate term the newspapers picked up from Wrieto-San himself, who'd made use of it the previous year in an attempt to justify his elopement to Germany. Anent the ongoing and spiraling catastrophe of Wrieto-San's press conferences: we j.a.panese have an expression, Nakitsura ni hachi, very roughly, When it rains, it pours.

163.

This is the very same singularly reluctant man, Sheriff W.R. Pengally, of Iowa County, whom Miriam would later seek to employ on the same pretext. Fruitlessly, as has been seen. Could it be that this public servant wanted no part of making such fine moral distinctions as to who was sleeping with whom? Or was he just averse to stirring the pot further? The newspaper article, which both O'Flaherty-San and I have examined, quotes him, rather comically, I think, as saying, "I told them I would do my best to thwart any attempt at tarring and feathering."

164.

She was no Olgivanna. From all accounts, Mamah was naturally gracious and undemanding, content to let the estate manager and housekeeper run things as they saw fit. And yet, if she perceived something amiss, she could be quite determined in rectifying it. As we shall see.

165.

I will refrain from comment.

166.

He was, in large part, using funds advanced him by several prominent U.S. connoisseurs of Asian art, most particularly the Spaulding brothers, William S. and John T., of Boston. We can only guess at the magnitude of his commissions on sale. And his schemes for expanding his own collection.

167.

We don't know if it was, in fact, raining that day, as all the princ.i.p.als are now dead and I never did ask Billy Weston about it when I had the chance. But O'Flaherty-San likes the echoes here of my own experience of fetching Daisy Hartnett and Gwendolyn Greiner from that very same station on an afternoon on which I can a.s.sure you it was raining with all the merciless ferocity rural Wisconsin could summon.

168.

I rely on O'Flaherty-San here. He spent some time in the islands while ricocheting round the ports of South and Central America on a merchant s.h.i.+p before transecting the Pacific to grace our lives in Nagoya. Jug-jug is a mixture of guinea corn, green peas and salted meat; pepper pot, as the name implies, is a spicy stew made with a variety of meats; and conkies a blend of cornmeal, raisins, coconut and sundry vegetables, served up in a banana leaf. I'm told the Barbadians-or Bajans, as they seem to call themselves-also love to eat flying fish on a bun, much in the way Americans eat hamburger.

169.

To prepare the drawings for an exhibition of his work in San Francisco, projected for the fall. It was, alas, not to be.

170.

Translated by Mamah Bouton Borthwick, A.M., with an introduction by Havelock Ellis. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912.

171.

"Love's Freedom" is one of the chapter headings in Key's Love and Marriage, also published in the United States in 1912. The chapter that precedes it is t.i.tled "The Evolution of Love," and it is succeeded by "Love's Selection," an application of Darwinian terminology to manners and mores, building toward the final chapters on free divorce and a new marriage law. One can't help seeing Mamah's pa.s.sionate embrace of the Swedish author as a means of self-justification, if not ritual cleansing.

172.

Edwin Cheney was remarried in 1912, a year after his divorce, to Miss Elsie Millor. They were to have three children and a placid life, a small mercy after the conflagration into which Mamah and Wrieto-San unwittingly tossed him. He prospered in business, doted on his children and never missed a college reunion.

173.

Certainly I can appreciate what the Barbadian must have been feeling, given my own experiences in the lily-white state, but O'Flaherty-San, as a gaijin in j.a.pan, brings his own sentiments to the table as well. He can scarcely walk down the street without people whispering "long nose" and "b.u.t.ter stinker" and the like behind his back. Our own family embraces him, of course, without prejudice, in respect to his qualities. Even if he is a gaijin.

174.

The telegram was duly delivered at two o'clock that afternoon at Midway Gardens, but Wrieto-San was not there to receive it. He was already on the train. With his son John. And Edwin Cheney. And with a heart pounding so violently I can hear it pounding still.

175.

This gets very difficult for me. If Wrieto-San had four women in his life-four chances at happiness-I had but two. After Setsuko's death, I thought of contacting Daisy, but I heard-through Wes-that she'd found an Englishman to marry in London, and though I never did discover how that turned out, I didn't have the heart to pursue it. But she was taken from me, just as surely as Mamah was taken from Wrieto-San, and I, like my estimable Master, was able to find solace and love, true love, in another woman, my wife, Setsuko. We came to love and esteem each other more and more through each day, I think-at least until that French cabbie came along. With his vin rouge. And his pulse of doom.

176.

I don't know if this is the time or place for it, but in keeping with precedent, I think I should identify the reference here. John is, of course, John Lloyd Wright (1892-1972), Wrieto-San's second son, who was apprenticing during the building of Midway Gardens. Like his older brother, Lloyd, he went on to become a well-known architect in his own right, but was perhaps even more celebrated (and remunerated) for another mode of construction altogether-he was the inventor of the toys known to children worldwide as Lincoln Logs. There may be a ripe irony in here somewhere, but I'm afraid I don't feel up to plucking it. Not now, at any rate.

177.

As it turned out, the Barbadian was never brought to trial. He succ.u.mbed in his jail cell some two months later, not from the effects of the acid he'd ingurgitated, but of a hunger strike. Billy Weston told me that Carleton couldn't have been more than a hundred-forty or -fifty pounds, and that he'd lost nearly half of that weight by the time of his death. From the moment he raised that s.h.i.+ngling hatchet, nothing pa.s.sed his lips but water. Nor did he talk. Strange man, stranger fate.

178.

As I reread these pages, I can't help imagining how different the world would be if Wrieto-San had sat down to lunch on that fatal day. He'd realized some 135 buildings to that point, a prodigious output for any architect, but the world would hardly know him as the monument he is today if he'd been buried beside his mistress in that little family cemetery in the outer reaches of nowhere. Think of what we would have lost-the Imperial Hotel, Fallingwater, the Guggenheim and all the rest of his constantly evolving and magisterial mature designs. Taliesin wouldn't exist except as a charred ruin in somebody's cow pasture. And I'd never have apprenticed with him or known his friends.h.i.+p and guidance. This book wouldn't be. O'Flaherty-San, brilliant as he is, might never have risen above the facile gratifications of fiction. One man-Wrieto-San-and what a banner he has carried for us all. A judgment indeed.

end.