The whole time they were away she missed Taliesin with an ache nothing would soothe, though the Japanese women were far different from what she’d supposed — the society very nearly matriarchal in some respects, the wives and mothers firmly in control while the men went off like so many schoolboys to play with their painted little geisha and drink rice wine till they lost consciousness — and the food, especially the fried dish they called tempura, appealed to her more than she’d thought it would. She was open-minded. She even asked for the recipe and tried to duplicate it once they got back home to Taliesin, but the coated vegetables and strips of fish she dropped into hot oil in the cavern of her deepest pot seemed only to bloat up and absorb grease like miniature sponges till the blandest fritter or heaviest doughnut would have been a gourmet item in comparison.
“The Asiatic experience was intensely interesting,” she said, summing it up for Diana Milquist over soggy fragments of what was meant to be tempura, “truly enlightening — if you could only see the way those people live. Nothing like here. Or Europe.” She poked at a limp bit of carrot that had shed its batter, thinking how primitive conditions were, especially in the countryside. She thought of the wooden pallets, paper walls, the toilet that was little more than a hole in the ground. “Nothing at all.”
Still, if she’d found Japan a bit of a trial, Frank was invigorated. He bought up prints till their rooms were filled with them, working with money he seemed to draw out of a hat like a magician,166 and when they returned he began making preliminary sketches for the hotel project, though nothing had been confirmed. Another year — a blissful year — rolled by at Taliesin, and then, from an unexpected source, a major project for Chicago pleasure gardens modeled on those in Germany and Scandinavia came his way and he plunged into it with all his characteristic ferocity of purpose and vision. Spring came that year on a dizzying wave of perfume from the blossoms of the hundreds of fruit trees he’d planted, pear, apple, peach, apricot, plum, and if the pleasure gardens — Midway, they were calling the place Midway — kept him away from Taliesin a good proportion of the time, it was only for the better. Truly. It was. Because she loved him all the more now that he needed her in a practical way, not merely as soul mate and avatar, but as mistress of the house — she was in charge now that he was away so much of the time, and she consulted with the employees and worked to her utmost to make the place shine as it rightfully should, as a testament to him.
It was glorious. She was his right hand and his left hand too and everything fell into place as the days lengthened and warmed and the vines climbed up the sunstruck walls and the honeybees charged the air with a current so alive she could feel it in her veins. Glorious. Just glorious. Until the housekeeper abruptly quit. And then the cook.
“I won’t come to work here no longer,” the cook told her, “not for no pay — or pay whenever he feels like giving it out. And not with what people are saying.” The woman stood there before her in the kitchen that had been her exclusive domain, arms akimbo, big-bosomed and thick-waisted, with her sagging chins and loveless marriage, thankless and heedless both. “It’s sinful, that’s what it is. And sin and pay is one thing, but sin and no pay I just can’t abide, and I’m sorry, ma’am, I truly am.”
Mamah went straight to her desk and scraped together every coin and bill she could find there, wrapped it all up in a handkerchief and dropped it into the woman’s hands, but still she wouldn’t stay and she wasn’t about to beg her, that was for certain. But now suddenly she was the servant, she was the drudge — the daily accumulation of tasks far beyond her — and though she put out a call to the community, to Diana Milquist and the few women she could call friends, no one came up the drive to work for Slow-Pay Frank and his tarnished mistress.
She did the best she could, but she began to feel as if she were out of breath all the time, as if dusk followed dawn without an interval, without surcease, and the first thing to suffer was her writing. She simply didn’t have time for it. Or for reading either. Or reflection. Or even walks over the hills or a swim in the lake or anything else, her every waking moment focused on keeping the household from collapse while Frank ran to Chicago and back again. Somehow she managed to make it through the month of June, wielding mop, broom and scrub brush in a fury that took her right out of her body and doing her utmost to maneuver around the big pots in the kitchen and prepare the meals for Frank and the men he had working the place. But she was no cook and she’d be the first to admit it, her bread as flat as her flapjacks and her flapjacks charred and rubbery at the same time and the weather too hot for standing over the oven so that the chops were reduced to jerky and all the color seared out of the steak and rump roast. And then one evening in the middle of July, when she’d begun to despair, her hands coarsening, her skin darkening like a peasant’s, every joint and muscle aching day and night and the sweat thick at her hairline and gummed up under her arms and between her legs till she was permanently chafed and simply to move was an agony, Frank came in off the train from Chicago with his grin alight and said, “You know, I think I just may have a solution to this little domestic problem.”
She’d gone down to the station to meet him in the automobile, with Billy Weston at the wheel, and it seemed to her even hotter at seven in the evening than it had been at noon. She brushed her hair away from her face, trying to look fresh for Frank — and she’d changed her dress, though it was already wet through where she’d leaned back in the seat. Frank was handing his suitcase into the car while Billy saw to his baggage — pottery wrapped in brown paper, yet another carved Buddha, the broad plane of the Oriental brow and the flat unresisting nose poking through the package. He was lively and full of himself and though he hadn’t embraced her — he wouldn’t till they were out of sight of prying eyes — he’d already managed to brush up against her twice and she could see he was in urgent need of her. He was grinning. Ducking his head and shuffling his feet on the pavement and tugging at the brim of his hat as if he meant to snatch it right out from under the crown.
“Yes,” she said, letting out a long slow breath while fanning herself with the palm of one hand, “and what is it? What’s your solution?”
“Say, Billy,” he called, turning his head away a minute just to keep her in suspense, “I think I might want to drive tonight and you can climb in back or just go on home to your wife if you like. She’s missing you, you know she is. And that boy of yours too. Doesn’t he ever wonder where’s his daddy? ”