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Автор Том Корагессан Бойл
T. C. Boyle
The Women
For Karen Kvashay
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The following is a fictional re-creation of certain events in the lives of Frank Lloyd Wright, his three wives — Catherine Tobin, Maude Miriam Noel and Olgivanna Lazovich Milanoff — and his mistress, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. While actual events and historical personages are depicted here, all situations and dialogue are invented, except where direct quotes have been extracted from newspaper accounts of the period. I am deeply indebted to Frank Lloyd Wright’s many biographers and memoirists, especially Meryle Secrest, Bren-dan Gill, Robert C. Twombly, Finis Farr, Edgar Tafel, Julia Meech, Anthony Alofsin, John Lloyd Wright and Ada Louise Huxtable, and I would like to thank Keiran Murphy and Craig Jacobsen, of Taliesin Preservation, Inc. , for their assistance, and Charles and Minerva Montooth and Sarah Logue for their kindness and hospitality.
THE WOMEN
Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility; I chose arrogance.
PART I. OLGIVANNA
INTRODUCTION TO PART I
Ididn’t know much about automobiles at the time — still don’t, for that matter — but it was an automobile that took me to Taliesin in the fall of 1932, through a country alternately fortified with trees and rolled out like a carpet to the back wall of its barns, hayricks and farmhouses, through towns with names like Black Earth, Mazomanie and Coon Rock, where no one in living memory had ever seen a Japanese face. Or a Chinese either. Stop for fuel, a sandwich, a chance to use the washroom, and you’d think a man had come down from Mars and propped himself up on the seat of a perfectly ordinary canary-yellow and pit-of-hell-black Stutz Bearcat roadster. (And what is a bearcat, anyway? Some hybrid monster out of an adman’s inventory, I suppose, a thing to roar and paw and dig at the roadway, and so this one did, as advertised.
) Mostly, along that route on a day too hot for October, and too still, too clear, as if the season would never change, people just stared till they caught themselves and looked away as if what they’d seen hadn’t registered, not even as a fleeting image on the retina, but one man — and I won’t take him to task here because he didn’t know any better and I was used to it by then — responded to my request for a hamburger sandwich by dropping his jaw a foot and a half and exclaiming, “Well, Jesus H. Christ, you’re a Chinaman, ain’t ya?”The whole business was complicated by the fact that the ragtop didn’t seem to want to go up, so that my face was exposed not only to the glare of the sun and a withering cannonade of dust, chicken feathers and pulverized dung, but to the stares of every stolid Wisconsinite I passed along the way. The ruts were maddening, the potholes sinks of discolored water that seemed to shoot up like geysers every fifty feet. And the insects: I’d never in my life seen so many insects, as if spontaneous generation were a fact and the earth gave them up like grains of pollen, infinite as sand, as dust. They exploded across the windscreen in bright gouts of filament and fluid till I could barely make out the road through the wreckage. And everywhere the lurching farm dogs, errant geese, disoriented hogs and suicidal cows, one obstacle after another looming up in my field of vision till I began to freeze at every curve and junction. I must have passed a hundred farm wagons. A thousand fields. Trees beyond counting. I clung to the wheel and gritted my teeth.
