I bowed. Deeply. As deeply as I’d ever bowed to anyone in my life, even my reverend grandfather and the regent of Tokyo Imperial University.
He returned my bow with one of his own — abbreviated, a bow of the head and shoulders only, as befitted his position in respect to my own. At the same time he surprised me by offering a greeting in Japanese. “Konnichi wa,” he said, leveling his eyes on me.
“Hajimemashite,” I replied, bowing a second time.
Wrieto-San was then sixty-five, though he admitted to sixty-three and looked and acted like a man ten or even fifteen years younger. In his autobiography, which had been published to great acclaim that year, he claimed to be five feet eight inches tall, but he was considerably shorter than that (I stand five feet seven and over the course of the ensuing weeks had the opportunity on a number of occasions to compare height casually with him and I certainly must have had at least an inch on him, perhaps two). He was dressed like an aesthete heading to an art exhibition: beret, cape, high-collared shirt, woolen puttees and the Malacca cane he affected both for elegance and authority. His hair, a weave of thunderhead and cumulus, trailed over his collar.
“Ogenki desu-ka?” he asked. (How are you?)
“Genki desu,” I replied. “Anata wa?” (I’m fine. And you?)
“Watashi-mo genki desu.” (I’m fine too.)
This seemed to have exhausted his Japanese, because he leaned in against the hood of the Cord, seeking the light as if to get a better perspective on me, and switched to English. “And you are?”
I bowed again, as deeply as I could. “Sato Tadashi.”
“Tadashi? I knew a Tadashi in Tokyo — Tadashi Ito, one of Baron Ōkura’s group.” He gave me an appraising look, taking in the sheen of my shoes, the crease of my trousers, my collar and tie. “Your name means ‘correct, ’ yes?”
I bowed in acknowledgment.
“And do you suit your name? Are you correct, Tadashi?”
I told him I was—“at least at the drafting board”—and he let out a laugh. He was a great one for laughing, Wrieto-San, a repository of playfulness and merriment and a natural soothing charm that only underscored the magnetism of his genius. And, of course, he was famous for his acerbity too, his moods and his temper, especially if he felt he wasn’t getting the respect — adulation, worship even — he felt he deserved.
“And proper too?”
Another bow.
He was grinning now, his whole face transformed. “Well, I tell you, Tadashi, I have to say this is one of the features I like best about your people,” he said, straightening up and dancing a little circle round me on the paving stones — he could never remain static for long, his enthusiasm inexhaustible, his energy volcanic. “The following of the norms and strictures. I can be like that too,” he said, and he gave a wink to preface the sequel, “but I hope you won’t be shocked, Sato-San, if I’m improper more than I am proper. Wouldn’t want to pin a man down, would you? Shackle him with convention?”
I didn’t know where the conversation had sailed off to, but I understood that this was a form of banter and that the only answer necessary was a soft murmured, “No.”
“But you’re the one from Harvard, via the Institute of Technology, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”>
“My observation”—he was forever making pronouncements, as I would come to learn, and he’d made this one before—“is that Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students and makes prunes of them.”
His tone indicated that laughter was called for and so I laughed and told him that he was right. Knowing how deeply he’d been influenced by the architecture of my nation, by the simplicity and cleanness of line of our homes and temples, I bowed again and said, “I simply could not go back to Japan with the sort of classical and ornamental education I was getting at the university. .”
“So you came to me.”
“I wanted a hands-on approach, organic architecture, the use of native materials and the design of buildings that complement rather than dominate nature, all of this, all you’ve pioneered, in the Robie house, the Darwin Martin, the, the Willits and—”
His expression — and I mean no disrespect at the comparison — was like the drawing-down of a lapdog’s features when it’s rolled over and stroked. He looked gratified — I’d said the right thing, precisely the right thing — and he was inwardly complimenting himself on his choice of Sato-San as a pupil. “Good,” he said, holding up a hand to forestall me. “Excellent. But I warn you, I am no teacher and there will be no instruction here. The Fellowship, as I see it, will offer you an opportunity to work at my disposal, for my purposes, in all phases of supporting my enterprise as a working architect. You do understand that, don’t you?”
I said that I did.
“All right, fine. You’ll start in the kitchen. Mrs. Wright tells me we need an extra hand there.” A bell had begun to ring — it was, as I’d soon learn, a Chinese artifact he’d brought back with him from one of his far-eastern excursions and it tolled every day at four so that the Fellowship could gather outdoors in the tea circle for afternoon refreshment. He’d already turned and started off in the direction of the sound, when he swung back round on me. “And this car, Tadashi — is it yours?”
“Yes, Wrieto-San.”
We both looked to the Bearcat crouched there behind the Cord, its fenders flaring and canary hood aglow despite the layer of dust. Wrieto-San’s expression had become sober, judgmental, the sort of look he adopted for discussions of all pecuniary matters, which, sad to say, were at the very heart of his life. To think that a man of his stature — not to mention age, wisdom and genius — should have to scramble continually to make ends meet, struck me then as unconscionable, as it does now, all these years later. And yes, I’d heard the rumors — that he was broke, pitifully few commissions coming in as a result of his misadventures and the scandals that had dogged him through the course of the past twenty years, the Depression drying up the pool of potential clients, his work considered derrière-garde in the face of changing fashion, the Fellowship simply a way of milking money out of those gullible enough to think his aura could communicate anything bankable to them — but still I was shocked to discover how much of the man was involved in simply keeping things afloat. He was tightfisted, no other way to say it. Maybe even something of a confidence man. And what did they call him in Spring Green, the nearest town? Slow-Pay Frank.
“Isn’t it a bit extravagant?” he wondered aloud. “That is, wouldn’t it have been wiser, all the way around, if you’d put your money into the Fellowship? This tuition — it can hardly cover room and board, let alone all the other benefits you’ll see here — and I’ve kept it artificially low in order to get things started, given the difficult times. But really, Tadashi, this is. . excessive.”
It wasn’t for me to point out the discrepancy here. Though I will say privately that the Cord must have cost many times what I’d paid — or rather my father had paid — for the Bearcat, which was, I admit, something of an indulgence. But then I liked fine things too — and I’d never before owned an automobile. What I said, however — with a bow — was that the car wasn’t what it appeared to be.
“It’s a Stutz, isn’t it?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.