Frank let out a sigh. “Well, why don’t you take him, then?”
“Why don’t you? You’re his father, aren’t you?”
“Don’t start in,” he said, and she wanted to laugh in his face. Who was he to tell her what to do? She was the one stuck with the bills, stuck with the house, the children, his mother.
“Llewellyn,” she snapped, “get to bed. Now!”
The child looked startled — sleepy, cranky — but startled too. He wanted to raise a fuss, she could see that, but the tone of her voice warned him off. Very slowly, as if he were climbing down from an impossibly high and treacherous place, feeling for footholds all the way, he left his father’s lap and started across the room, head down and shoulders slumped in defeat. “I’ll be up shortly,” she said, softening. And she looked at Frank. “I must speak with your father a minute.”
But Frank was already on his feet, shying away from her, and she had to come up out of the chair and take hold of his arm to keep him there in the room with her. “You tell me,” she said, trying to keep her voice under control, “just what’s going on here. And you tell me now.”
The look he gave her was absolutely empty. He wasn’t annoyed or angry, only indifferent. “As soon as I can make the arrangements, I’m leaving,” he said.
“Leaving? What do you mean? You just got here—”
She thought she heard footsteps in the hallway. There was a thump from the floor above. The house ticked and hummed around her like some alien space, a place she’d never inhabited, never been happy in.
He jerked his arm away from her. “I want a divorce,” he said.
She ignored him. She wouldn’t listen. Wouldn’t hear him. “But where will you go?” she heard herself say. “Where will you live?”
His face went secret. She saw that he’d been planning this a long time — the break, the final break, all the fanfare of his homecoming just a pretense so he could appear properly contrite for the public so the public would give him commissions and go on lionizing him rather than suffer him like the pariah he was. “My mother,” he said.
“Your mother? You’re going to move in with your mother? Are you mad? Have you lost your mind?”
“She’s selling her house. She doesn’t want to be here anymore. She”—and he hesitated over the lie—“she wants to go back to the country, to Wisconsin. To be close to her people, her sisters and brothers.”
She was silent a moment, trying to take it all in. There was a calculation here, an algebra of the emotions as abstruse as anything in any of the textbooks on her children’s desks. Stupidly, she said, “You’re not serious. You’re joking. Tell me this is some kind of cruel joke.”
“There’s a plot of land she’s buying there — near the Hillside School. She’s asked me to build her a house on it”—and he repeated himself, the surest sign of a liar—“so she can be close to her people. In her old age. She wants a place for her old age.”
And now, suddenly, the equation came clear: solve for y when x equals Mamah. “It’s for her, isn’t it? You’re going to build a place for her, for your, your—”
“Go ahead, say it. Call her what you will. Because she’s something you could never in your life imagine, and I’m sorry to say it, Catherine, but that’s how it is.”
She could feel everything turning inside of her as if she were caught in a mangle and she was flushing red, she knew it, and her face was ugly, hot and ugly and hateful. “What is she, then? Huh? You’re the great saint, the great spirit — you tell me!”
He was calm now and that calmness frightened her more than anything — it meant he didn’t care, meant he was already gone. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Her voice flew out away from her and she didn’t want to make a scene, didn’t want the children to hear, but she couldn’t help herself: “No, no. You tell me, what is she that I’m not? Tell me!”
The house went silent. The night came down and lay across the roof like a presence out of the forest primeval that had once stood here, on this lot, while Indians beat their squaws and stripped the flesh from their enemies with knives of stone. He drew himself up. Leveled his eyes on her. “She’s my soul mate, Catherine. Can’t you understand that? My soul mate.”
CHAPTER 4: TALIESIN
It was the same old conundrum: how to build what he saw in his mind’s eye, how to raise a thing of beauty from the earth so that people would look at it and marvel for a century to come, without first raising the money to see it to fruition. Money. It was always a question of money. He’d borrowed from Sullivan to buy the lot for the Oak Park place all those years ago,153 and while he couldn’t very well sell it out from under Catherine, he’d already hit on the expedient of remodeling the place so she could rent out half of it and at least have a reliable income. He would provide for her and the children too, that was his responsibility and he would meet it — no one could say he was neglectful there, though they might whip him over Mamah all they wanted, pinching their noses and crossing the street to avoid him as if he were a leper. And he’d just have to find a means of raising money, not only for the remodeling, but for the new house that was already taking shape in his dreams and his waking hours too, a place away from all this confusion, a place where he could live and work in peace till it all blew over.
And that was something he just couldn’t understand, the way the whole community had gone after him as if he were an axe-murderer or Kropotkinite or some such. He’d left a prosperous practice a year ago to go off to Europe and improve himself and now he had nothing, and how was he to get work if no one would negotiate with him in good faith or even look him in the eye for fear of catching his moral contagion? How did they expect him to live, these moral paragons trapped in their own miserable little lives and marriages as dead and loveless as the rugs on the floors of the insipid boxes they called home? There was no Christian charity — a sad joke, that was all it was — and no forgiveness either. He hadn’t been home three days when the Reverend George M. Luccock of the First Presbyterian Church, a man he scarcely knew, preached a sermon against him, which was, of course, duly reported in the papers. He still had it seared in his memory—When a man leaves his wife and family and goes over to this other woman, such a man has lost all sense of morality and religion and is damnably to be blamed—though he’d crumpled up the paper and tossed it in the fire like the rag it was. Damnably to be blamed. Why couldn’t they leave him alone to live his life as he saw fit? Who made the rules to contain him? Rules were for other people, ordinary people, people who had neither insight nor originality or any sense of the world but what they’d been force-fed by the Reverend Luccocks and their ilk.
Well, he’d played out the charade in Oak Park as long as he could stand it, the loving father and repentant husband come home to his family, manfully unfurling the Christmas tree, splitting wood for the hearth, throttling the goose and gathering his children to his bosom, but he saw much further than any of them could ever imagine. And as the year turned and he put out inquiries everywhere for work, commissions or outright loans and his mother’s house went up for sale and Kitty burned and the newspapers flapped away over some fresh scandal, he could think of nothing but that property in Wisconsin, the hill there, his vantage and his refuge. He’d roamed its flanks as a boy, sat atop the crest of it to contemplate the valley spread out below him while the clouds ran across the sun and the insects chirred and deer slipped out of the shadows to browse in the long grass at the edge of the woods. It was a magical place, as serene and uncluttered and pure as the open skies above and the glacial till underfoot, with views to the Wisconsin River on one side and the far end of Paradise on the other. And it was set squarely in the middle of the valley his grand-parents had settled, just over the slope from his aunts’ school and the home he’d built for his sister, the most perfect site in all the world for the house and farm and workshop he saw rising there, a place of native wood and amber stucco and stone, yellow dolomite limestone laid rough, just as it had come from nature. A place to catch the light. To surround with orchards and gardens. To dwell in as if it had been there forever.