Her voice captivated him. Soft, rhythmic, the beat of the phrases a kind of music in itself, and what was her accent? Eastern European of some sort — Polish? Romanian? He said, “She’s married to a diplomat, isn’t she? Running a school now”—he’d gleaned this from the program and added, redundantly—“in London.”
“The Royal Academy of Dancing. She helped to found it.”
“Yes,” he said, talking past Albert’s flaming face, “yes, of course. But let me introduce myself — and my friend here, this is Albert Bleutick—”
She dropped her eyes a moment, then came back to him. “But you do not need an introduction,” she murmured, and he felt the blood charge through his veins as if a ligature had been loosened. “Certainly, this is the case, no? But I am Olga Milanoff, known to my friends”—and here she paused to let him consider the freight of nuances the association was meant to carry—“as Olgivanna.”
Somewhere, somehow, Albert got lost in the shuffle, and Frank couldn’t really recall when or where it had happened — on the way to the tea dance to which he’d invited her or after they’d got there? No matter. From the moment the three of them left the theater at intermission till they hustled out into the drenched streets looking for a cab, he could think of nothing but the excitement of the affair at hand, the old libidinous fires restoked,7 the quickening pulse of possibility. Was he too old for this sort of thing? Was he wary, considering what he’d been through with Miriam — and before her, Mamah and even Kitty? If the thought crossed his mind, he dismissed it. Age was nothing to him — he was fifty-seven and fit as a farmer — and he was one of those sexually charged men who couldn’t live without a woman at the center of his life. Already, since the official break with Miriam, though she’d been dead to him for a year and more, he’d come very close to finding that woman in the bow mouth and satiric eyes of a certain lady novelist,8 and when that proved impossible on any number of scores, he’d moved a coed from the University of Wisconsin into Taliesin and his bed. But he wasn’t satisfied. Not yet. Not even approximately. He needed—complication. Love, yes. Sex, of course. But something more than that, something fraught and embattled, a relation to make the juices flow in every sense.
The sandwiches were soggy, the tea tepid. Albert disappeared. The orchestra played the old songs in the old dreamily civilized way of pre-war London (tango, yes, but delivered up in a rendition that was almost sedate) and stayed away from the jittery nonsense of the speakeasies. They talked for two hours and more. They danced and she was as light in his arms as a feather pillow. He let her know that he didn’t smoke or drink and she didn’t mind at all, even as so many of the other couples on the dance floor showed the obvious effects of alcohol and every time they looked up one man or another was spiking his companion’s tea with a clear liquid decanted from a flask. She agreed with him that jazz music was, for the most part, hyperactive. And yes, she did love Bach, one of her earliest musical inspirations when she was a girl in Montenegro.
He must have lifted his eyebrows—Montenegro? — because she informed him that this was a kingdom on the Adriatic and that she came from an exalted family of warriors and judges. “We are Serbs,” she told him, over-sugaring her tea, a cucumber sandwich arrested at her lips. “Do you know Serbs?”
“Oh, yes,” he lied, “yes, of course. Hundreds of them.” But he was smiling — his flashing eyes, his floating hair — and breezed right past it: “And I’m still waiting for my first Montenegrin commission. You don’t think the king over there might want a new palace? In the Prairie Style? Or how about a pleasure dome on the sacred River Alph?” His smile widening to clinch the joke. “Or is that in another part of the world?”
He dropped her that night at the apartment where she was staying with disciples exiled — like her — from Gurdjieff’s enclave in Fontainebleau, 9 and he was there the next morning, flowers in hand, to take her to breakfast. That was the beginning of a more elaborate dance, a waltz in three-quarter time that swept them through the corridors of museums, galleries and concert halls, with side trips to admire the houses he’d built in the city and in Oak Park, and which culminated in the inevitable invitation to Taliesin.
It was December, a week before Christmas. An arctic front had advanced across the Great Lakes and the skies were stripped of color. She packed her bags — a few things only, an outfit or two for jaunts through the country, formal wear for dinner — and she came alone on the train through the whitening stubble fields and forlorn villages of Illinois and Wisconsin, having arranged for her daughter to stay behind in Chicago with her estranged husband.10 She would remember that journey all her life, the sense of enclosure and security the coach gave her as the snow ran against the windows and she ate the sugared buns she’d brought with her and sipped coffee from the cup of her thermos, the world reduced and tranquil. Though she had a book with her — a bound manuscript Georgei had given her when she left Paris — she never opened it. She hardly noticed the other passengers, didn’t speak a word to anyone. She was wrapped up in something complex, something that brought her deep, into the deepest part of herself, and as the coach thumped and jostled and ran smooth over the uninterrupted stretches, she leaned into the window and watched the ghost of her reflection run along with it.
Was she trading one guru for another, was that it? A luminous middle-aged magus of inner sight for an equally luminous middle-aged wizard of outward form and structure? Inner for outer? Was she choosing this man — and she whispered his name aloud: Frank, Frank—because he was the supreme deity of the field in which Vlademar was a mere toiler, Vlademar whom she’d married too young, at eighteen, to know any better and who was divorcing her because he refused to allow her to express herself in any way at all? Was going off with Frank Wright any different from going off with Gurdjieff — to dance, to serve, to absorb the radiance with her mouth, her fingers, her heart and mind and spirit? Or was it simply a father she was looking for, a father to replace the one she’d lost? No matter, because there was one surety in all of this, one thing she knew without stint: he was hers if she wanted him. And this journey, this weekend ahead, would settle that once and for all.
He was there waiting for her at the Spring Green station, his automobile idling at the curb, the exhaust spectral against the backdrop of the new-fallen snow. There was snow in his hair, snow salting his beret and his coat and his long trailing scarf. “Olgivanna,” was all he said, and then he was embracing her there on the platform for anyone to see while his chauffeur — one of the workmen from Taliesin, Billy Weston — held open the door of the car for her. She felt the floorboards vibrating beneath her, caught a scent of the exhaust mingled with the soap Frank used, and then Billy Weston put the car in gear and they were moving. In a matter of moments the town fell away behind them and they were out in the countryside, trees heavy with snow, the road paved in white, smoke coiling away from farmhouse chimneys and livestock trampling the yards in dumb display. It was as if they’d gone back in time.
She gazed at Frank. Held tight to his hand. He talked the whole while, the words spilling out of him, every turning in the road or glimpse of a barn’s faded red flank a cause for celebration, his voice so melodious and rich it was as if he were singing. She watched his eyes, his lips, the flutter of his tongue against the roof of his mouth: he was singing and she was his audience. She was almost surprised when Taliesin drew into sight, the lake in front of the house capped white atop the ice, and the house itself clinging low to the ground and huddling beneath its own weight of snow and the forest of icicles depending from the eaves. It was like something the ancient Celts might have built, or the barrow men before them: mystical, out of time, as ancient as the dirt it stood upon and the stone pillars that supported it. What did she say as they wound their way up the drive? That it was beautiful, magical? Or no: that it was living art. That was what she called it: living art.