They could have been married in Los Angeles or even Chicago (quietly, quietly, because whether they bowed to convention and he legitimated her with his ring and a kiss as if they were just any common Joe and Jane was nobody’s business), but the symbolism of Taliesin was irresistible and when he proposed it she didn’t demur or even hesitate. “Yes,” she said, “there’s no place I’d rather be,” and for once she meant it. This was where his heart was, this was where his mother lay buried and the ghost woman too, Mamah, the phantasm she’d had to compete with through all these gratuitous years at his side. It was perfect. She’d have it no other way. And if the wind screamed down out of Canada and the hogs threw up their stink and the rubes sat stupefied in their parlors while her light shone out over the ice-bound river in the witching hour of the night, then so much the better.
But now it was a question of shoes. Of her dress. Flowers. A midnight supper. The cake. Would there even be a cake? Did it make any sense? Who was going to eat it? If it were up to Frank they’d dine on cheese sandwiches and apple cider, but she would have champagne, crepes, caviar, and she wouldn’t discuss it, not for a minute. If he thought she was going to get married without a champagne toast and at least the semblance of real cuisine, then he’d gone mad. Clear out of his mind. Cuckoo. She fought to stay calm as the day approached, though she wanted to fly out at the maid, the cook, at Billy Weston and anyone else who crossed her path, and she could see that Frank was wrought up too. More than once she heard his enraged voice echoing through the caverns of the house like the report of distant thunder, but he put on a face for her — and she for him. In fact — and it moved her so deeply she found herself dabbing her eyes to realize it — they were tenderer with each other than they’d been since that fraught and glorious week when they first met, when she was his ideal made flesh and her every movement bewitched him.
She hid herself away on the night of the wedding, bathing and dressing and making herself up with a precise measured care that took her through each step of the way as if she were rehearsing her catechism, and no, she didn’t need the maid’s help or the pravaz’s either. She was purposeful, calm, utterly absorbed in the moment. On her lips was the poem she’d committed to memory for him, the best translation she could make of the scroll that had hung in her tatami room in the green fastness of the mountains above the Kantō Plain when he came to take her away. It was from the hand of a woman who’d lived a thousand years ago at the court of the Empress, in a time devoted to the fulfillment of the senses, to beauty, poetry, art and love, and she would give it up to him there, in the cold of the primeval night as the stars wheeled overhead and the judge intoned the immemorial phrases and the ring slipped over her finger.
She spoke it aloud one final time, lingering over the rhythms and the aching sweet release of its sentiment. “ ‘The memories of long love, / gather like drifting snow,’ ” she murmured, watching herself in the mirror — beautiful still, still unspoiled, still capable of ascending to the very highest plateau of love and grace abounding — even as her voice dropped to a whisper, “ ‘poignant as the Mandarin ducks / who float side by side in sleep.’ ”
She held her own eyes a moment, looking as deeply into herself as she dared, and then she went out to marry him.
PART III. MAMAH
INTRODUCTION TO PART III
Wrieto-San liked soft pencils. In his paternal — some would say tyrannical — way he banned hard pencils from the drafting room, but there were many among us who preferred them for the crispness and authority of the lines they produced, Herbert Mohl in particular. Herbert was sensitive to criticism, as we all were, but he’d been around Taliesin longer than any of us and we deferred to him, so that there was a period there during which people began to use hard 4H pencils for their drawings in defiance of Wrieto-San’s dictates. (And he preferred soft pencils because their lines were easier to erase, as he was continually erasing while he drew and thought and revised and drew and revised again—“The eraser is the most important instrument of the architectural design,” he used to say, making it one of his mantras.) One afternoon — it was cold, winter shrouding the windows, a certain post-luncheon lethargy casting a pall over the drafting room — he emerged suddenly from his office to stroll amongst us, as he did twenty times a day, and we all rose to our feet in deference. “Good God, it’s like a meat locker in here!” he cried. “Can’t any of you keep up the fire?”
We all looked to the fireplace. There was a fairly good blaze going, three tiers of logs stacked up and the flames licking upward from a healthy bed of coals — in fact, Wes had laid on another log not five minutes before — but of course all that mattered was the Master’s perception, not ours. Dutifully, I left my desk and bent to the fire with the poker in hand so as to settle the logs, then laid on another neatly split length. “Ah-ha!” I heard Wrieto-San call out behind me even as the Lucullan heat scorched my face and hands. “Hard pencils! You, you’re guilty, aren’t you, Herbert? And you, Marian. And, Wes — not you, Wes, tell me it isn’t true!”
He was being facetious, of course — you could hear the lilt in his voice and know he was in a capital mood — but there was a treacherous undercurrent here as well. By the time I’d swung round (I used soft pencils only, incidentally, both as a matter of preference and in homage to the Master) he’d snatched up all the hard pencils he could find, darting round the room like a leprechaun or whatever the Welsh equivalent might be, and tossed them into the heart of the blaze. Then he sprang up on a drafting stool and spread his arms wide. “I’ve just snatched victory from the jaws of defeat!” he sang (a phrase he usually reserved for the occasion of making alterations to our drawings), and we all, but for Herbert, laughed aloud.
I tell this story because it illustrates the kind of hold Wrieto-San exerted over us all whether we rebelled in an attempt to define our individual selves or not. Herbert continued to use hard pencils on the sly, just as I used soft ones — as I still do today — but the point is, every time we put pencil to paper Wrieto-San was in our thoughts. And, of course, as I’ve indicated, it wasn’t just architectural matters over which he held sway, but everything else as well, from our diets to the clothes we wore and the automobiles we drove to whom we chose to date or marry.
Perhaps I did subvert his wishes here, on this last point, but I feel to this day that I was justified — I didn’t need to be treated like a child, nor did Daisy. If we came together in love and affection and a mutuality of taste and interest and outlook, that was nobody’s business but our own. Or so I thought. Until Wrieto-San — and Mrs. Wright, who was equally culpable — disabused me of that notion.
I could see it coming, of course, from that very first day after Daisy’s arrival when both the Wrights gave me a good dressing-down, but when the boom finally fell, I was unprepared for it nonetheless. Or, no (and why, at this distant remove, must I be so ridiculously proper?) — I was stunned. Heartbroken. Scalded by the sheer audacity and treachery of it. Still, I don’t think it would have happened in quite the way it did — or perhaps at all — if they hadn’t been hyper-sensitized around that time by Svetlana’s elopement with Wes.