“Because we can cancel it. Just say the word and I’ll send them all home.”
But she had to go through with it, had to do what she could to meliorate the situation, put an end to the rumors and speculation — for her children’s sake and her own too. And for Frank’s. The children needed to go back to school. She needed to go about her business. And though she felt like an outcast, felt as if she were walking into a public stoning and wanted to be anyplace else in the world, she told him no and strode into that room with her spine straight and her head held high.150
“Mrs. Wright!” one of them called out, but the reverend silenced him with a glare and she wouldn’t look at them, so many of them, utter strangers gathered here in the inner sanctum of her house with the sole purpose of destroying her and her family, and they were hateful to her, no better than murderers, all of them. She took a minute to compose herself — whiskers, all she saw was whiskers, a rolling sea of facial hair — and in a clear unflagging voice began reading from the statement she’d spent the better part of the past two days composing.
“My heart is with my husband now,” she began. “He will come back as soon as he can. I have a faith in Frank Lloyd Wright that passeth understanding, perhaps, but I know him as no one else knows him. In this instance he is as innocent of wrongdoing as I am.” Was her heart slamming at her ribs like a spoon run round the bottom of a pot? Were they all, to a man, giving her looks of incredulity, distrust even? It didn’t matter. Because these were her words and they would report them, that was what they were there for, that was their purpose, their function in life — to report. They’d reported the dirt gleefully enough and now they could report the sweeping clean of it too.
The room was very quiet. One man tamped his pipe against the palm of his hand and made as if to rise and dispose of the ashes in the fireplace, but thought better of it. She glanced to the windows, wishing she could float up across the room and escape like a vapor, but they were shut and locked, dense with a strange trembling light, as if a biblical flood had in-undated Oak Park while she’d been speaking, the silent waters seeping in till they were all of them sunk here forever. Perhaps it was that thought — the thought of water abounding — that made her realize how thirsty she suddenly was. She swallowed involuntarily, swallowed everything, fear, hope, shame, and went on.
She talked about Frank’s struggles as a young architect who’d come to Chicago with nothing and become the great man he was through hard work and application, about how his present predicament was simply another bump along the road, one he was fighting to overcome with all the fierceness of his will. “Frank Wright has never deceived me in all his life,” she said, and believed it too, at least in the grip of the moment. “He is honest in everything he does. He is the soul of honor.”
There was a silence. She could see that they were all trying to digest this last bit of information, their faces strained and flummoxed. And then they started in with their questions, Reverend Kehoe recognizing first one and then another. “Are you planning to start divorce proceedings?” a man in front wanted to know, and she answered him spontaneously, passionately, with real conviction, as if she’d become a convert in the course of these past ten minutes and had never in her life had an untoward thought for her husband. “Whatever I am as a woman,” she averred, “aside from my good birth, I owe to the example of my husband. I do not hesitate to confess it. Is it likely then that I should want to commence court action?” And she assured them that he’d be back once he was able to master himself and win the battle he was now heroically fighting on her behalf and on behalf of his children. And that when he returned — and this she truly believed, the passion of the moment aside — all would be as it had been before.
“But what of Mrs. Cheney?” a rangy insolent young man in the rear wanted to know, and who was he? Mr. Adler. The one who’d broken the story and caught her unawares in her own house. Well, she wouldn’t be caught twice, that was for certain.
“Yes, what of her?”
“When he comes back — your husband, that is — how will she fit into the picture?”
Here it was: the moment of truth. She could see them all take in a breath. There was a collective flipping back of note pages, a tightening grip on the stubs of pencils. This was what they’d come for.
Mamah, showy Mamah, with her dance hall laugh and high tight girlish figure, rose up and tripped through her consciousness, and she very nearly slipped up, but she didn’t. “With regard to Mrs. Cheney,” she said, and Reverend Kehoe gave her a sharp glance, which she ignored, “I have striven to put her out of my thoughts. It is simply a force against which we have had to contend. I never felt I breathed the same air with her. It was simply a case of a vampire — you have heard of such things?”
They had. Of course they had. They made their living off of them, scoured the alleys and brothels and the dirtiest, lowliest dens to dig them up and show them in the light of day — for profit. For a good story. And here it was, as good a story as they were going to get: Frank was innocent of anything more than falling under the spell of a vamp, and she, Catherine, Kitty, his wife, stood behind him with all her heart.
For all that, though, she’d been abandoned, and she knew it. Frank didn’t write her. Didn’t cable or communicate in any way, though he must have known about the newspapers, must have known the position she’d been put in — but apparently she was a stranger to him now, worse than a stranger, because he wrote strangers all the time on one matter of business or another, bartering his precious prints or ordering so many custom-made suits or hats or board feet of cypress or a new saddle for the horse he couldn’t ride because he was away in Europe. What had she done to deserve such treatment? Such disdain? And this silence — above all, this maddening silence?
It was just after Christmas when he did finally write — to Lloyd, begging him to come over to Europe and help him work on the drawings for his portfolio — and Lloyd came directly to her because he was dutiful and loyal and took her side (all the children did, and Frank, when he returned to them, would just have to face the consequences of that). At first she was opposed to the idea. Outraged, in fact. Frank had run out on her and now he wanted to take her eldest son away from her too? What next, ship the whole family to Germany or Italy or wherever he was and install Mamah Cheney as their mother in her stead? No, she told him, absolutely not, and she spent a dismal afternoon in bed, alternately sobbing into the pillow and staring at the ceiling, feeling as lost and desolate as she ever had in her life. She might have stayed there the rest of the week if Llewellyn hadn’t come to the door dragging one of his battered toys behind him and asking her in one breath why she was so sad and informing her in the next that he was hungry. “Mama, will dinner be ready soon?” he asked her, and he was Frank entirely, not a trace of Tobin in him, Frank’s image exactly. “Because I’m hungry. I want a piece of cake. Can I have a piece of cake?”
After a while — dinner helped settle her, seeing the children gathered round the table chattering on about the events of their own lives, lives that had nothing to do with marital discord and the empty place at the head of the table — she began to see things in a different light. This was a positive sign, wasn’t it? At least Frank was reaching out — he must have been missing his family as much as they were missing him, their first Christmas apart, the house cheerless without him, every gift and song a sham, every ornament hung on the tree weighted with absence. Lloyd was nineteen, the age Frank was when he first apprenticed as an architect, and this would be his chance for employment, advancement, an association with his father and an opportunity to see the world — she couldn’t deny him that.151 And another thought occurred to her too, and if it was purely selfish, who could blame her? Lloyd would be her spy. He would bridge the silence, become her ears and eyes, shrink the gulf that lay between her and Frank, give her reason to hope again because Mamah was nothing, a fancy and nothing more, and he would be coming home, she knew he would. And Lloyd — how could he resist him, his own son? — would be the one to bring him back.