The Women: A Novel Part 21

While he may have been the world's greatest architect, Wrieto-San lacked expertise when it came to electrical devices. Half the wiring at Taliesin was jury-rigged and we were forever watching a lightbulb sizzle in the socket or plugging in a lamp or radio to the sound of an explosive pop and the odor of scorched wires.

25.

No surname available. No one seemed to recall anything about him, except that he was called Mel.

26.

One wonders if Wrieto-San ever stopped to think what he was doing. To create the fiction of Olgivanna as his housekeeper and almost immediately impregnate her begs the question.

27.

By apprentices.

28.

Martha (Mamah) Borthwick Cheney, 1869-1914.

29.

A considerably inflated figure, it seems to me. But then Wrieto-San was always over-valuing his collections-his j.a.panese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) especially-in order to raise money against them as a sop to the vast armies of his creditors.

30.

Three mistresses, three Taliesins. One can only imagine how Olgivanna must have felt with regard to the line of succession. Given her private education, certainly she must have been acquainted with Henry VIII.

31.

I don't know how far this homily would go in a.s.suaging the fears of a young girl morbidly afraid of lightning, but I had it from a reliable source-Svetlana herself. And she was a perfectly well-adjusted (and quite fetching) girl in her teens when I knew her at Taliesin. Of course, she did run off at seventeen to elope with Wes Peters, incensing Wrieto-San.

32.

True enough. Wrieto-San employed the same subterfuge with regard to Miriam's role in the household when he moved her in ten years earlier, even going so far as to draw up a contract putting her wages at $60 a month, but it proved transparent. Within days, the papers were decrying the architect's continued flaunting of convention, denouncing Taliesin as a "Sin Nest" and "Love Bungalow" and the like.

33.

Jasper J. Jesperson, 3720 Figueroa, Los Angeles, California. Private Investigations of a Discreet Nature.

34.

An indication that Wrieto-San was attempting to be discreet, if not deceptive. In recent years, he'd come to prefer the Congress, on Michigan Avenue (an undistinguished edifice, really, built in 1893 as an annex to Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building across the street), perhaps because it was the place to be seen, its Pompeian Ballroom attracting the smart set as well as Chicago's social elite. I never stayed there myself, even in later years when I could easily have afforded it-the only time I spent a night in Chicago during my apprentices.h.i.+p was when Daisy Hartnett and I were able to get away on the pretext of her mother's illness. The hotel we chose was inconspicuous, to say the least. And a whole lot cheaper than the Congress.

35.

Miriam was noted for the originality of her dress.

36.

Magnesium oxide. Remember magnesium oxide? The famous photograph of myself and three other apprentices leaning over Wrieto-San's shoulder as he plied the tools of his trade was taken during the flashbulb era, of course, but I still have the photograph my father insisted I pose for in commemoration of my return to the United States some four years earlier. The picture shows an earnest, slim (I wish it were so now) young man in jacket and tie and formally lubricated hair who is about to experience a coughing fit as the cloud of magnesium dust engulfs him on a wayward gust off the San Francis...o...b..y. I believe I spat up white phlegm for a week.

37.

This was a private ceremony, in November of 1923. The reporter's confusion may allude to Miriam's comments to the press in 1915, shortly after it was discovered that she had moved into Taliesin as Wrieto-San's mistress. At that time she quite forcefully expressed her contempt for the inst.i.tution of marriage ("Frank Wright and I care nothing for what the world may think. We are as capable of making laws for ourselves as were the dead men who made the laws by which they hoped to rule the generations after them").

38.

As will be seen below, the yellow press of the day came to refer to Wrieto-San and his "affinities" in a kind of shorthand nomenclature, so notorious were their affairs and so public the airing of their laundry, as the saying goes.

39.

Precise derivation of the nickname unknown. A Montenegrin endearment?

40.

She'd allegedly been jailed for a brief period in Paris after attacking her ex-lover with a knife, and from the beginning she made it known to Wrieto-San that she was not to be trifled with. She kept a pistol. And she firmly believed that her scarab ring was invested with the power to reconcile her accounts in the supernatural sphere, almost in the way of the Voodooists of Haiti and New Orleans.

41.

Vladimir Lazovich, a s.h.i.+pping agent living in Queens, New York. Olgivanna's brother. Not to be confused with Vlademar, her former husband.

42.

For Wrieto-San an uncharacteristic emotion.

43.

Catherine "Kitty" Tobin Wright (1871-1959), Wrieto-San's first wife. They married, against all sense and advice, when he was twenty-one and she just out of high school. The children-Lloyd, John, Catherine, David, Frances and Llewellyn-came in rapid succession, like plums dropping from a tree. By all accounts, Wrieto-San seemed bewildered by them. It is unlikely that he would have given much thought or consideration to Catherine's pregnancies, beyond the obvious financial and architectural exigencies to which they gave rise.

44.