Miriam watched him set down his clubs, prop them carefully against the fence and start across the lawn in his loose easy strides, his shoulders slumped in the conciliatory way of very tall men. She’d always liked Dwight. He was uncomplicated, stalwart, mild without being wishy-washy, and he treated Leora as if she were the only woman on earth.
“Don’t mind if I do,” he said, ducking in out of the sun. “Hot out there on the course, what with this devil’s wind. .” He stood a moment, arms akimbo, grinning down at them, and if Miriam had the sense that he was looking down the front of her bathing costume and admiring her bare legs, well, so much the better. He was a sweet man. And appreciative.
The conversation ran off on its own, light and amusing, the banter of three old friends united under an avocado tree on a late summer afternoon within sight of the distant sun-coppered crescent of the Santa Monica Bay, and the Chinese brought the beaded cocktails on a lacquered tray and Miriam felt her mood lift to yet a higher plane. They were midway through their second cocktail when Dwight suddenly leaned back in his chair and slapped his forehead. “Jeez,” he said, letting out a hiss of air, “I nearly forgot — did you hear the news? Because I thought of you right away, and Frank, because you were over there—”
“News?” Leora’s smile expanded till her lips drew tight. “How could we hear any news”—and she giggled again, this time in a thicker, throatier way, the gin at work—“when we’ve hardly moved between the chair and the pool all day?”
“The earthquake. In Tokyo. Everybody in the clubhouse was talking about it.”
Miriam felt her own smile fade. Frank had been obsessed with earthquakes the whole time they were in Japan, and there was the one that struck when they were in their rooms at the hotel, terrifying in its suddenness, as if a freight train had come right on through the door and out the window all in a minute’s time. “Was it — is it serious? I mean, do they know if there’s been damage—?”
Dwight turned to her, the wind rattling the stiff leathery leaves overhead. His eyes faded a moment and then flickered back to life. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “yeah. They’re saying it’s bad. Buildings down, fires, the whole works.”
“And the hotel? Did they say about the hotel?”
In the next moment she was up out of her chair, the suit clinging damply to her as she hurried barefoot across the yard and into the house to call Frank. Her heart was pounding as she stood dripping on Leora’s carpet in the dim hush of the front hallway and waited for the operator to connect her — she was imagining the worst, the Imperial in ruins, Frank’s reputation destroyed, the Baron and the Ablomovs and Tscheremissinoff transformed into refugees, or worse, injured, killed — when Frank came on the line. “Hello? Miriam, is that you?”
She didn’t have to ask if he’d heard — his voice betrayed him. “Yes,” she said, and a calm came over her because she was going to stand by him no matter what, prove herself, defend him in the face of the whole world, “it’s me. I’ve just heard the news.”
There was a crackle of static. “They’re saying”—his voice sank so low she could barely hear him—“that it’s the worst earthquake in the history of Japan. And that Tokyo took the brunt of it.”136
“Any word of the hotel?”
“No. Nothing.”
She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. The receiver of the phone was dead weight in her hand — it took an effort of will just to hold it to her ear. “I don’t care,” she said, the words coming so fast she could scarcely get them out, “because I can see it standing there now, not a window shattered, a testament to you, to you, Frank, even if the whole city’s destroyed around it, and I don’t care what they say, I don’t—”
They were in limbo for twelve interminable days.
The papers were full of the story, headlines trumpeting disaster, the least detail pried from the wreckage by the ghouls of the press, but nothing was certain, no one could be trusted till the full accounting was in. Frank was so distracted he couldn’t seem to sit in a chair for more than two minutes at a time. He paced endlessly. Lost his appetite. Let his work lag while he twisted the radio dial and worried the newspapers. The cruelest moment was when they were awakened by the phone ringing in the middle of the night only to have a reporter from the Examiner, full of himself, full of the joy of Schadenfreude, crow over the line that the Imperial had been destroyed and wondering if Frank had a statement to make. Miriam came up out of the morass of sleep, groggy, drugged, buried in a river of oneiric mud, saying, “What? What?” And his voice was there, in the dark, crackling with outrage, truth against the world: “On what authority? How do you know? Have you been there and back on a magic carpet? No, no: you listen to me. The Imperial Theater might have gone down, the Imperial Hospital, the Imperial University and all the thousand other buildings that trumpet the Emperor’s connection, but if there’s a structure standing in all that torn country it will be my hotel. And you can print it!”
How she loved him for that — for his fierceness and certainty. Get his back up against the wall and he’d fight like a lion. She lay there that night listening to his breathing decelerate, declining through the layers of consciousness till he was asleep beside her, her man, her fiancé, her very own personal genius, Frank Lloyd Wright, creator of the Imperial Hotel, may it stand ten thousand years. And even as she drifted off she heard the workers chanting all the way across the spill and tumult of the waves, Wrieto-San, Wrieto-San, banzai!
The telegram finally reached them on the evening of September 13. It had been forwarded through the Spring Green office to their apartment in Hollywood just as they were sitting down to dinner. Frank’s hands quivered as he tore it open. And then his face flushed and he was reading it aloud:
FOLLOWING WIRELESS RECEIVED FROM TOKIO TODAY
HOTEL STANDS UNDAMAGED AS MONUMENT OF YOUR
GENIUS HUNDREDS OF HOMELESS PROVIDED BY PERFECTLY
MAINTAINED SERVICE SIGNED OKURA IMPEHO
137
And now the press could feed on him to its heart’s content. Now she and Frank could open the doors and stand there arm in arm for the photographer’s flash and Frank could prance and crow and sermonize and she, in the shadows no longer, could stand at his side and broadcast his genius to the wide world. She was so proud of him. And he — beaming, glowing like a one-hundred-watt bulb and offering up his grandest smile — he was proud of her.
In the wake of that — the tumult of the press and the international outpouring of awe and gratitude and congratulation that rocketed Frank so far ahead of his competitors and critics that he became, in a single heroic stroke, the most famous architect in the world and no one even to raise a whisper to deny it — the next two months slipped by so quickly she scarcely knew where they went. She kissed Leora on both cheeks, in the French way, her eyes full and her heart luminous, and then she and Frank returned to Wisconsin to make themselves ready, one more shriving of the soul and the flesh too. She was a new person altogether, newborn, and she stood at the tall living room windows looking down the long avenues of light and felt herself open up inside, lifting higher and higher till she was a bright fluttering pennant on a breeze that could never chill her again. The trees gave up their leaves. The weather turned bitter. The lake froze so hard it could have supported the weight of every automobile and tractor in the county. And the night sky was clear all the way to the rooftop of the universe, the stars strung from its beams in a cool white shatter of bliss. For her. For her and Frank.