“Here,” he said, and he opened his wallet to her and they kissed till she felt the rigid heat of him ready to run right up inside of her and then he was sitting with her in her compartment on the train, holding her hand in his, and the conductor gave his shout and Frank stepped back on the platform and waved at the glass as the wheels jerked and the station fell away behind her.
If there was a moment that made it all worthwhile, a single moment she might have captured with a photograph and pressed into an album of memories, it was when she stepped through the door of the stateroom high out over the roiling sun-coppered waters of the Hudson and saw him standing there, his arms open wide to receive her. He’d kept her waiting three days in that hotel in New York and she’d never left the room, not once, for fear of discovery. Her thoughts had weighed on her. She missed the children. She slept poorly. Edwin would have been back in Oak Park by that point and the alarm would have gone up, every gossip and scandalmonger in town putting two and two together, and would he send a detective out after her? Would he be that petty, that vindictive? Even Kitty, poor dull Kitty, must have known the truth by now. And, of course, though Frank had come to her the night before, they were constrained to go aboard separately — to take separate taxis even — so as not to show their hand. She’d been in a state all morning, everyone she laid eyes on a potential betrayer, the desk clerk, the doorman who showed her to the cab, the driver himself, and she felt all but naked as she stood there on the pier waiting for them to see to her luggage before she could go up the gangplank and vanish amidst the crowd. Until she was there, until she felt the ship plunge and rise majestically beneath her feet, she kept bracing for the moment that someone would shout, There she is! The deserter! The adulteress! Stop her!
Frank had decorated the room, flowers everywhere, pottery, a selection of his Japanese prints propped artfully in the corners. She saw the sunlight caught in the portholes as if in a private universe, the scent of the flowers supercharging her senses, the geisha in their elaborate robes smiling benevolently on her from the confines of their frames and Mount Fuji, distant and white-clad,146 lending its aura of solidity to the delirium of happiness that washed over her. “There’s no stopping us now,” Frank said, his smile widening. He snatched her arm before she could think and whirled her round the room to the strains of an imaginary orchestra, all the while humming in her ear. Then he showed off the appointments as if he’d designed them himself, fretted over her as she put her things away, insisted on a promenade of the decks while the horn sounded and the ship pulled back from the pier and the gulls rode a fresh breeze out over the river. “And let’s eat,” he cried. “Let’s have a feast to celebrate. Anything, anything your heart desires. Because this is the first day of all the days to come, the first day of freedom to do as we please. Isn’t it grand?”
And she felt it too, thinking of Goethe, the translation she’d been making for him as the hours ground themselves out like cinders in that lonely hotel room, Faust, thinking of Faust: “ ‘Call it happiness!’ ” she recited, holding tight to his arm, “ ‘Heart! Love! God! / I have no name / For it! Feeling is everything!’ ”
And it was, till the second day out when Frank turned the color of liverwurst and couldn’t get out of bed. “I’ll never make a pirate,” he told her, his voice faint and throttled. She watched him hang dazed over an enameled pan, his stomach heaving, watched him contort his limbs and walk shakily to the toilet, watched him sleep and groan and pull the blankets up over his head as if he could hide away from the pitch and yaw of the heavy seas that blew up around them for the entire two weeks of the journey. She sat by him all the while, nursing him, reading aloud, drilling him on basic German phrases—Ich spreche ein wenig Deutsch; Ein Tisch für twei, bitte; Moment! Es fehlt ein Handkoffer! — and he was utterly childlike, like John when he had the grippe, like Martha. He would take broth only. He was always cold, wrapped miserably in his blankets. He complainedincessantly. Edwin — that stone, that block — was like an admiral compared to him. But none of that mattered, because feeling was all and Frank was a repository of feeling, a bank of feeling, fully invested. She read to him till the words went numb on her tongue, she laid a wet compress on his brow, massaged his shoulders and the cramped tight muscles of his calves. He was miserable, but she was strong and each day getting stronger.
When they arrived in Bremen, he recovered himself. He ate so much in one sitting — dumplings, Spätzle, Sauerbraten, Schmierkäse, pickles and kraut and rich thick slices of pumpernickel slathered with butter — she thought he would burst. By the time they got to Berlin, he was his old self, prancing at her side, his cane twirling and the tails of his cape flapping in the brisk breeze he generated all on his own, and when they entered the Hotel Adlon on Unter den Linden, everyone turned to stare as if the Chancellor himself had arrived. He strode up to the desk, pulling her along in his wake, spun the register round with a flourish, and in his slashing geometric hand signed Frank Lloyd Wright and Wife without thinking twice about it.
CHAPTER 3: THE SOUL OF HONOR
That it had to have been one of the children who answered the door — Catherine, with her young lady’s poise and eagerness, expecting good news, a letter from her father, a parcel she’d sent away for, a friend from school come to gossip over the boys — only made the situation all the worse. “Mama,” Catherine had called, making her way through the house to the kitchen. “Mama, there’s a man here to see you. Says he’s from the Tribune.”
She’d been busy with dinner, trimming the roast, mashing potatoes, peeling carrots and onions and running from the icebox to the sink and stove and back again, and she was in her housedress and apron, her hair pinned up hastily to keep it out of her way. She wasn’t expecting guests. Certainly not a stranger. And certainly not a man from the newspaper.
“What does he want? It’s not the subscription, is it?” And then, as if she were talking to herself, “Are we behind on that too?”
Catherine stood in the doorway, an expectant look on her face. She shrugged. “He didn’t say.”
Kitty looked at her for a long moment, her daughter leaning against the doorjamb now, insouciant, pretty, with her mother’s eyes and her father’s stature, in her school clothes still, a ribbon in her hair, the locket at her throat catching the last fading streak of sunlight through the window. She was fifteen years old, almost sixteen — nearly as old as she’d been when she met Frank. The thought arrested her a moment, made her feel nostalgic and protective all at once, and then Frank was ringing in her thoughts like a tocsin. Was it Frank? Was this about Frank?
The man was waiting for her in the entranceway, just inside the door. He was in his twenties or perhaps early thirties, in an ill-fitting suit in some sort of checked pattern, and his tie was sloppily knotted. He gave her the smile of a small child presented with a rare gift. “Mrs. Wright?” he said.
“Yes,” she answered, giving him a puzzled look in return. And though she had a premonition that whatever he wanted would be unwelcome — she could see it in his eyes, a flutter of superiority, as if he knew something she didn’t — she heard herself say, “Won’t you come in?” She led him to the inglenook and the fire laid there. The light was dulling outside. A wind scattered leaves across the yellowed remnants of the lawn. It was November seventh, a date she would never in all her life forget.