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LOVING FRANK by Nancy Horan
On Sale: April 8^th
Paperback
400 pages
ISBN-10: 0345495004
ISBN-13: 9780345495006

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.

So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.

In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, LOVING FRANK is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.

Nancy Horan, a former journalist and longtime resident of Oak Park, Illinois, now lives and writes on an island in Puget Sound. Visit

Nancy Horan’s impressive first novel, LOVING FRANK, recreates the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney and her shocking love affair with famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The two met while living in Oak Park, Illinois, and both were married with children. After consulting on a house for her and her husband, Mamah began an affair with Frank that culminated with the pair eloping in Germany to escape the prying eyes of the judgmental press and the decimated families they left behind.

Once in Europe, Frank sets to work on several architectural projects, and Mamah, a modest feminist in her time, begins translating the works of popular European suffragist Ellen Key. Mamah thinks that Key is speaking directly to her, especially when Key talks about marriage, family and the struggle to feel complete as a person. Mamah feels horrible about abandoning her children yet at the same time realizes that she was dying a slow but no less painful death in an unhappy marriage. She desperately wants to work and believes that this --- much more than motherhood --- completes her, although she has never stopped thinking about her children and whether or not they would ever understand her plight.

Of that time back in Oak Park, Mamah writes in her journal: “I’ve been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.” She throws caution to the wind and dives into life with Frank, which has its share of ebbs and flows. She learns that her beloved can be boastful, prickly and not very forthright about money, but still she is committed to forging a life with him. Soon after arriving in Germany, the American press tracks them down and the couple must flee to another town.

When the pair returns from Europe, they look to Wisconsin to give them the wide open spaces necessary to build Frank’s latest creation, Taliesin, a home like no other. Once there, both Frank and Mamah take greater steps in rekindling relationships with their children, which proves to be more difficult than anticipated. She cannot make up for her years abroad but tries to find some middle ground with her son and daughter. As she attempts to reconcile her relationship with the moody architect and her neglected kids, Mamah and her family are struck by a violent and incomprehensible tragedy.

More than just a retelling of their ill-fated romance, LOVING FRANK delves into Mamah’s life and personality, turning her into a fully fleshed-out character. She is not a long-suffering wife nor a pitiful object of scorn. Rather, she is trying to figure out what centuries of women before her and since have been trying to determine: how to reconcile one’s private self with one’s role as mother and wife. Her struggles are still relatable to this day, which is exactly what Leslie Bennetts’s recent book, THE FEMININE MISTAKE: Are We Giving Up Too Much? addresses.

Frank is an incredibly talented and somewhat smug character, with his own particular way of doing things. He feels that “laws and rules are made for the average man” and clearly acknowledges that it’s his genius “…that causes people to make allowances.” Mamah is both in awe of his talent and amazed in his confidence, finding both comfort and inspiration in his bravado.

LOVING FRANK is told in the third person, mostly from Mamah’s perspective. By choosing to focus on her thoughts and feelings, Horan is able to illuminate a certain time and place, not only for an unmarried couple, but for a woman of that time as well. Mamah has tried to balance her life as a wife and mother, and also as an individual. Through her relationship with Frank, she thinks she has finally discovered a way to do just that --- but at what price? When their perfectly constructed lives are violently shattered, one wonders if that is the price for living unfettered, or were they merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Horan’s meticulous descriptions reveal that this relationship was not a mere sexual dalliance, but rather a bond cultivated over years of friendship and mutual respect. It was the fact that Frank appealed to Mamah’s intellect rather than her passion that she found so intoxicating. We see their relationship being built over time and then becoming an inevitable force all its own. Yes, they both made a conscious choice to leave their families behind, but Horan is careful to demonstrate that this was done with much reflection (and guilt) on Mamah’s part.

We may not agree with their actions, but we certainly can see Mamah’s predicament and empathize with the characters rather than judge them too harshly. Many years into the relationship, Mamah realizes that she and Frank’s first wife, Catherine, shared a painful reality: “The price both of them had paid for loving Frank was dear indeed.”

   --- Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller

A Conversation with Nancy Horan

Random House Reader's Circle: How did you become interested in Mamah Borthwick Cheney? Why do you think that it has taken so long for her to begin to emerge from out of the shadow of Frank Lloyd Wright and be seen as an interesting figure in her own right?
Nancy Horan: Anyone who lives in Oak Park, Illinois, as I did for twenty-four years, knows something about Frank Lloyd Wright. His home and studio complex attracts busloads of visitors from around the world, and his prairie houses dot the town. One of those houses belonged to Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the client who became his lover. The house Wright built for her and her husband is on East Avenue, the very street I lived on. When I toured Wright's home and studio several times, I noticed the guides didn't say much about Mamah; understandably, their focus is on his work and family life. What little I learned about her piqued my interest, though. She was a highly educated woman, a wife and mother of young children at the time of her affair, a feminist. Who was she, and why did she risk so much? A couple of biographies about Wright whetted my appetite. The more I learned about her, the more I felt compelled to tell her remarkable story.

Some scholars and Wright admirers have resisted discussing Mamah's role in his life, convinced that personal details they consider unsavory diminish his architectural achievements. Recently, though, a few scholars have taken a look at Wright's architecture while he was involved with her and have acknowledged Mamah Cheney's role in influencing the direction of his thinking.

RHRC: I understand that you spent seven years writing this novel.
NH: It took that long to complete the book. I should point out that I actually wrote the book twice. The first version, begun in 1999, included four points of view and was not very good. Two years into the project, when I decided to write from Mamah's perspective, the research became more focused. There was limited material. I had learned from Wright bios that no correspondence remained of Mamah Borthwick Cheney. So I went to original and secondary sources of information, reading newspaper clips from 1900 to 1914 and scholars' works on Wright, as well as his own writings. I visited the places Mamah visited and lived, and read the books she translated. I found an amazing memoir, written by a woman who grew up in the house next door to the Cheneys, in which the author reminisced about Mamah. Material on the Chicago School of Architecture proved captivating reading, as did books on the Modernism movement, which was happening in Europe at roughly the same time. Some primary research also turned up small details that illuminated her life, as well.

I came to see Mamah's time with Frank as a journey marked by a series of dilemmas and choices along the way. In the absence of letters, I made educated guesses about why she chose to do something, and the emotional consequences of those decisions. Her character began to come alive. Then, in 2001, I learned that nine letters written by Mamah to Ellen Key, the woman whose work she translated, were stored in the Ellen Key Collection in the Royal Library of Sweden in Copenhagen. You can imagine my joy when the library sent me copies of the letters. All along, I had been creating a character out of the pieces I could find to fit together, even composing letters she might have written. Suddenly, here was her actual voice, her actual handwriting. To my unending relief, I found her personality shining through in those letters. And while the content of her correspondence dealt largely with the business of translating, she included a number of paragraphs about her own life and mental outlook.

RHRC: It sounds as though the writing and research went on simultaneously.
NH: Yes, I researched heavily at the beginning, but continued to do so as I wrote. New discoveries found their way into the book. Last year, for example, a rare book of photographs of Taliesin in 1911 was auctioned on eBay and was purchased by a group of Wright devotees in Wisconsin. When the book went on display at the state capitol, I traveled to Madison to see it. Soon after, the album was in my novel.

RHRC: I'm curious about your title. While loving Frank Lloyd Wright was certainly the catalyst for Mamah to radically change her life, the novel shows that there was a lot more to her personal evolution than that. Why did you choose to stress this particular aspect?
NH: Mamah Cheney undoubtedly would have continued to evolve in interesting ways, but it was the condition of loving Frank that launched her on a path she could never have foreseen. While the novel explores ideas about gender roles and marriage at the turn of the twentieth century, it is fundamentally a very human story about loving someone, and having that experience change your life.

RHRC: The other great influence on Mamah's life was the Swedish feminist Ellen Key, whom you mentioned a moment ago. Key is not a familiar figure to most Americans --- what made her such an important figure in Western history, and in Mamah's history?
NH: Ellen Key was a Swedish feminist philosopher whose teachings on free love, the rights of the individual and of children, the social value of motherhood, whether in or outside of marriage, and the need for divorce reform were highly influential in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. The Women's Movement, or Woman Movement as it was then called, had its own personality there, compared to the movement in the United States. Ellen Key's ideas about the rights of unmarried mothers and their children had particular resonance for women in Germany and Sweden, while in the United States, the Woman Movement had shaped itself more in terms of gaining equal rights to vote, work, and earn as men did.

Ellen Key appeared in Mamah's life at a critical moment. Her impact on Mamah is best expressed by Mamah in one of her letters to the Swedish philosopher: "You have meant more to me than any other influence, but one, in my life. In your writings we have met close together, closer than I have been to almost anyone in the world."

RHRC: That "but one" being Wright himself. But what of the reciprocal influence that Mamah exerted on him?
NH: I believe Mamah had a profound influence on Frank Lloyd Wright. She took a leap of faith with him that changed both of their lives forever. She introduced him to Ellen Key, whose dedication to educating young people may have inspired Wright to devote himself to creating his own school for aspiring architects. And I think it can be argued that Mamah was the love of his life.

RHRC: Your writing is so assured, it's hard to believe LOVING FRANK is your first novel. What kind of work did you do previously, and what was your path to publication?
NH: I came to writing through journalism. I wrote newspaper and magazine pieces on subjects ranging from invasive Asian carp to Oprah's wardrobe to breast cancer, and eventually co-authored a book on garden design. About eight years ago, I took a couple of fiction-writing classes through the University of Chicago and found I loved that form. One of my instructors said to me after an assignment, "You could write a novel, but you haven't found your material yet." As it turned out, my material was right under my nose the whole time I was living in Oak Park. Eventually, the story of Mamah Borthwick Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright took hold of me and wouldn't let go.

RHRC: Although some aspects of Mamah's story, such as the scandal attached to the notion of a divorce or separation, are very much reflective of their time nearly a century ago, other aspects, especially her struggle to balance personal fulfillment with a fertile and loving connection to the lives around her, seem quite contemporary. Have those things really changed so little for women?
NH: While researching Mamah's story, I was struck repeatedly by how similar the struggles of early twentieth century women were compared to those of women today. Seeking fulfilling work was a relatively newfound possibility for women in those days, though the need to bring money into the household was nothing new. Whatever their motivation --- economic necessity or the realization of their personal potential --- women were very much concerned about the conflicts inherent in trying to manage both work and motherhood. It was a subject that was widely discussed and publicly debated, and feminist thinkers sought social solutions, such as collective child care or, in the case of Ellen Key, a state subsidy to the mother so she could stay home and take care of her children for a period of time.

Contemporary women have come a long way professionally, and have found ways to adapt. But the struggle hasn't gone away, and the dialogue, I think, tends to be more internalized by women these days.

RHRC: As a writer of historical fiction, how much leeway do you give yourself to invent and improvise? Frank Lloyd Wright himself once said, "The truth is more important than the facts." Do you agree?
NH: I felt strongly bound to stay with the major facts I had regarding the historical outline of this story. Some writers might find that approach stifling, but I found it liberating because it provided a compelling framework from which to work, and pushed me to try to understand the characters' motivations for what they did. Yet not all of the "facts" were reliable. Some of the newspaper information was inconsistent or clearly invented; Frank Lloyd Wright's own account of his relationship with Mamah was sketchy (he never mentions her name in his autobiography); and comments by people of the day have to be interpreted within the moral context of the times. While I included a number of characters based on real people in the novel besides Mamah and Frank, I also invented plenty of characters and certainly invented scenes. I took small liberties with matters of chronology, such as placing a speech by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1907 rather than when it was given, in 1909.

The beauty of fiction is that it allows a writer to get at truths of the heart that don't make it into history books or newspapers. In that sense, I agree with Frank Lloyd Wright's quote.

RHRC: It's one thing to set out the facts of the past accurately, but how do you enter with confidence into the inner, emotional life of a historical character? What was the key to unlocking Mamah's inner life?
NH: I entered into Mamah's emotional life by looking at the pressures and choices she made throughout her relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright. I was well on my way to imagining how Mamah felt and behaved during her journey when I found her letters. In them, I discovered a woman whose inner life was not so different from contemporary women. There are emotional experiences of the heart that were universal in 1909 and remain so today. My own understanding about love, motherhood, loss, and the need to find one's personal strengths naturally found their way into Mamah's fictional life.

RHRC: Was it easier for you to find that key for Mamah than for Frank? I would imagine that the wealth of historical documentation of Frank's life, both in his own words and the words of others, might have served to obscure, rather than to reveal, the man behind the legend.
NH: Well, Frank did talk a lot. And write. And expound about architecture and all kinds of other matters. But on the subject of Mamah, his words were spare and profound. I paid attention to them. It's important to keep in mind that I was portraying the forty-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright. Much of the verbiage for which he is famous had yet to be spoken, or written, at the time this book takes place. In LOVING FRANK, he is a complicated person at a critical juncture in his life, and not yet famous in the way he is today. By looking at him through Mamah's eyes, my hope is that readers can see the complexity of the still-developing, younger man, rather than the stereotype of the grandiose, white-haired legend.

RHRC: What would Mamah think of the condition of women in the United States today? Would she be satisfied with the progress since her own day, or would she believe there was still a long way to go?
NH: Mamah would be delighted to see that girls have the opportunity, more than ever before, to "realize their personalities," as she would have put it. She would be astounded by modern women's educational and career choices. I suspect, though, Mamah would be disappointed that the highly evolved culture of love that Ellen Key envisioned for the future has not panned out.

1907
Chapter 1

Mamah Cheney sidled up to the Studebaker and put her hand sideways on the crank. She had started the thing a hundred times before, but she still heard Edwin’s words whenever she grabbed on to the handle. Leave your thumb out. If you don’t, the crank can fly back and take your thumb right off. She churned with a fury now, but no sputter came from beneath the car’s hood. Crunching across old snow to the driver’s side, she checked the throttle and ignition, then returned to the handle and cranked again. Still nothing. A few teasing snowflakes floated under her hat rim and onto her face. She studied the sky, then set out from her house on foot toward the library.

It was a bitterly cold end-of-March day, and Chicago Avenue was a river of frozen slush. Mamah navigated her way through steaming horse droppings, the hem of her black coat lifted high. Three blocks west, at Oak Park Avenue, she leaped onto the wooden sidewalk and hurried south as the wet snow grew dense.

By the time she reached the library, her toes were frozen stumps, and her coat was nearly white. She raced up the steps, then stopped at the door of the lecture hall to catch her breath. Inside, a crowd of women listened intently as the president of the Nineteenth Century Woman’s Club read her introduction.

“Is there a woman among us who is not confronted --- almost daily --- by some choice regarding how to ornament her home?” The president looked over her spectacles at the audience. “Or, dare I say, herself?” Still panting, Mamah slipped into a seat in the last row and flung off her coat. All around her, the faint smell of camphor fumes wafted from wet furs slung across chair backs. “Our guest speaker today needs no introduction . . .”

Mamah was aware, then, of a hush spreading from the back rows forward as a figure, his black cape whipping like a sail, dashed up the middle aisle. She saw him toss the cape first, then his wide-brimmed hat, onto a chair beside the lectern.

“Modern ornamentation is a burlesque of the beautiful, as pitiful as it is costly.” Frank Lloyd Wright’s voice echoed through the cavernous hall. Mamah craned her neck, trying to see around and above the hats in front of her that bobbed like cakes on platters. Impulsively, she stuffed her coat beneath her bottom to get a better view.

“The measure of a man’s culture is the measure of his appreciation,” he said. “We are ourselves what we appreciate and no more.”

She could see that there was something different about him. His hair was shorter. Had he lost weight? She studied the narrow belted waist of his Norfolk jacket. No, he looked healthy, as always. His eyes were merry in his grave, boyish face.

“We are living today encrusted with dead things,” he was saying, “forms from which the soul is gone. And we are devoted to them, trying to get joy out of them, trying to believe them still potent.”

Frank stepped down from the platform and stood close to the front row. His hands were open and moving now, his voice so gentle he might have been speaking to a crowd of children. She knew the message so well. He had spoken nearly the same words to her when she first met him at his studio. Ornament is not about prettifying the outside of something, he was saying. It should possess “fitness, proportion, harmony, the result of all of which is repose.”

The word “repose” floated in the air as Frank looked around at the women. He seemed to be taking measure of them, as a preacher might.

“Birds and flowers on hats . . .” he continued. Mamah felt a kind of guilty pleasure when she realized that he was pressing on with the point. He was going to punish them for their bad taste before he saved them.

Her eyes darted around at the plumes and bows bobbing in front of her, then rested on one ersatz bluebird clinging to a hatband. She leaned sideways, trying to see the faces of the women in front of her.

She heard Frank say “imitation” and “counterfeit” before silence fell once again.

A radiator rattled. Someone coughed. Then a pair of hands began clapping, and in a moment a hundred others joined in until applause thundered against the walls.

Mamah choked back a laugh. Frank Lloyd Wright was converting them --- almost to the woman --- before her very eyes. For all she knew five minutes ago, they could just as well have booed. Now the room had the feeling of a revival tent. They were getting his religion, throwing away their crutches. Every one of them thought his disparaging remarks were aimed at someone else. She imagined the women racing home to strip their overstuffed armchairs of antimacassars and to fill vases with whatever dead weeds they could find still poking up through the snow.

Mamah stood. She moved slowly as she bundled up in her coat, slid on the tight kid gloves, tucked strands of wavy dark hair under her damp felt hat. She had a clear view of Frank beaming at the audience. She lingered there in the last row, blood pulsing in her neck, all the while watching his eyes, watching to see if they would meet hers. She smiled broadly and thought she saw a glimmer of recognition, a softening around his mouth, but the next moment doubted she had seen it at all.

Frank was gesturing to the front row, and the familiar red hair of Catherine Wright emerged from the audience. Catherine walked to the front and stood beside her husband, her freckled face glowing. His arm was around her back.

Mamah sank down in her chair. Heat filled up the inside of her coat.

On her other side, an old woman rose from her seat. “Claptrap,” she muttered, pushing past Mamah’s knees. “Just another little man in a big hat.”

Minutes later, out in the hallway, a cluster of women surrounded Frank. Mamah moved slowly with the crowd as people shuffled toward the staircase.

“May-mah!” he called when he spotted her. He pushed his way over to where she stood. “How are you, my friend?” He grasped her right hand, gently pulled her out of the crowd into a corner.

“We’ve meant to call you,” she said. “Edwin keeps asking when we’re going to start that garage.”

His eyes passed over her face. “Will you be home tomorrow? Say eleven?”

“I will. Unfortunately, Ed’s not going to be there. But you and I can talk about it.”

A smile broke across his face. She felt his hands squeeze down on hers. “I’ve missed our talks,” he said softly.

She lowered her eyes. “So have I.”


ON HER WALK HOME, the snow stopped. She paused on the sidewalk to look at her house. Tiny iridescent squares in the stained-glass windows glinted back the late-afternoon sun. She remembered standing in this very spot three years ago, during an open house she and Ed had given after they’d moved in. Women had been sitting along the terrace wall, gazing out toward the street, calling to their children, their faces lit like a row of moons. It had struck Mamah then that her low-slung house looked as small as a raft beside the steamerlike Victorian next door. But what a spectacular raft, with the “Maple Leaf Rag” drifting out of its front doors, and people draped along its edges.

Edwin had noticed her standing on the sidewalk and come to put his arm around her. “We got ourselves a good times house, didn’t we?” he’d said. His face was beaming that day, so full of pride and the excitement of a new beginning. For Mamah, though, the housewarming had felt like the end of something extraordinary.

“OUT WALKING IN a snowstorm, were you?” Their nanny’s voice stirred

Mamah, who lay on the living room sofa, her feet propped on the rolled arm.

“I know, Louise, I know,” she mumbled.

“Do you want a toddy for the cold you’re about to get?”

“I’ll take it. Where is John?”

“Next door with Ellis. I’ll get him home.”

“Send him in to me when he’s back. And turn on the lights, will you, please?”

Louise was heavy and slow, though she wasn’t much older than Mamah. She had been with them since John was a year old --- a childless Irish nurse born to mother children. She switched on the stained-glass sconces and lumbered out.

When she closed her eyes again, Mamah winced at the image of herself a few hours earlier. She had behaved like a madwoman, cranking the car until her arm ached, then racing on foot through snow and ice to get a glimpse of Frank, as if she had no choice.

Once, when Edwin was teaching her how to start the car, he had told her about a fellow who leaned in too close. The man was smashed in the jaw by the crank and died later from infection.

Mamah sat up abruptly and shook her head as if she had water in an ear. In the morning I’ll call Frank to cancel.

Within moments, though, she was laughing at herself. Good Lord. It’s only a garage.


Chapter 2

Mamah woke to the sound of Edwin moving through his daily ablutions. Clink of his shaving brush against the porcelain cup, soft thud of a collar on the dresser. Snap of cuff links. It was Saturday morning, but he had a day trip planned to Milwaukee. In a few minutes he would be out the door with his derby and attaché.

The next sound she heard was John’s bare feet pounding down the hall way.

“Mamaaaa,” he shouted, leaping into the bed and flopping his skinny little body on top of hers.

She feigned sleep, then flipped the elfin boy suddenly onto his back, tickling until he was helpless. “What’s the magic word?”

John squealed deliriously.

“What’s the magic word?”

“I don’t remember!”

“Hint,” she said. “It’s a vegetable.”

He moaned. “Can we have a new word?”

Mamah pondered for a moment. “All right, then. Pirate.”

John registered surprise. “I like that.”

“Everyone likes pirates,” Edwin chimed in, “no matter how bad they are.”

He kissed the tops of their heads. “See you around eight tonight, if all goes well.”

She got out of bed, put on a robe, and went to get the baby out of her crib. Martha was standing at the rail, bobbing and babbling. Mamah changed her diaper, then set her feet on the floor. The girl grabbed hold of her mother’s thumbs and walked haltingly down the hall toward the living room. This time of year, the west windows and the heavy woodwork conspired to make the living room dark. Mamah aimed her daughter toward the adjoining library, where sun streamed through a south-facing window. There she paused to stand in the light. The warmth felt like joy itself to Mamah. It seemed that sometimes, when the sun hit her face in just this way, her skin had its own memory. She could be five years old again, looking out at the summer fields from the window of the Iowa farmhouse where she’d been born.

Dear God, how she loved the sun; this past winter had been the darkest, most paralyzing one she could remember. It was nearly April, but no spring was in sight. The usual soggy sadness would have to run its course for another month. All she really needed, she thought, was just one ray coming in. She could sit in this place and think about the day ahead, make a plan. Maybe she could accomplish something for a change.

Lizzie was in the dining room, still wearing her nightgown and studying the morning paper, her hair loose around her shoulders. “Huge sale at Field’s today,” she called to her sister.

“Nobody died?” Mamah picked Martha up and carried her to her high chair.

“Well, actually, the Cat Woman? Over on Elmwood? She died.”

Mamah settled Martha, then nuzzled her niece, Jessica, who was eating cereal next to John. She enjoyed the sense of reprieve that Saturdays brought, with the children in their slippers and nightclothes all morning, the help gone, and Lizzie at home, reading the obituaries out loud over breakfast.

“How was the Cape’s speech yesterday?” Lizzie asked.

“Oh, you know Frank. He charmed everyone to death.” Mamah laughed. Her sister had private nicknames for people whose foibles she found amusing. Lizzie was pretty in the same way Jessie had been, with delicate features and fawn-colored hair. While Jessie had been the den leader and cockeyed optimist, though, Lizzie was the dry wisecracker. “You are wicked, you know. Who would guess the sweet second-grade teacher from Irving School has a stripe of meanness as wide as a skunk’s?”

Lizzie lowered the newspaper and flicked her limpid eyes in John’s direction. “I think your mother just called me a skunk.” The dark-haired boy bent over in giggles. “Do you need anything from Field’s?” Lizzie asked Mamah.

“We could use some new sheets for John and Jessica’s beds,” Mamah said, tucking a napkin around Martha’s neck. “But I can’t go. I have something --- ”

Louise came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. “I could take the children,” she offered.

“You’re not even supposed to be working today,” Mamah chided.

“And what was I going to do?” Louise planted her fists on her hips. “Go swimmin’?”

“You can’t push the pram in this mess.”

The older children looked up from their cereal. They sniffed an adventure.

“I’ll go along, and we’ll take turns carrying Martha,” Lizzie said.

“You should take the car if it will start, Liz. Let me see if I can get it going.”

“All right, then. I’ll be dressed in ten minutes. What about the rest of you?” In a heartbeat, John and Jessica were on their feet, scampering down the hallway.


CHAPTER 3

When the house was empty, Mamah went to the bathroom to fill the tub. Sitting on its edge, she stared at the ceiling, furious with herself. Why on earth did I invite Frank Wright to come over here?

It was perhaps six months since she and Ed had gone to the theater with Frank and Catherine. For a period after they’d built the house, they had socialized with the Wrights fairly often, perhaps once a month. Now a friendly distance had developed. Frank’s reputation had grown considerably since those early days when they’d consulted on the house. Not since then had she and Frank shared a private conversation.

During construction, with some building detail as a starting point, they had lost themselves time and again in deep discussion. Those six months of collaboration seemed enchanted to her now. Frank Lloyd Wright had ignited her mind like no other person she’d ever met. At first their conversations were about ideas. They talked about Ruskin, Thoreau, Emerson, Nietzsche. Mamah told him of her passion for Goethe. He spoke reverently of his years working for Louis Sullivan, the great architect he called “Leiber Meister,” dear master.

They began to see each other as fellow outsiders, making jokes about “Saints’ Rest,” the name Oak Park had earned for its church spires and absence of taverns. In the village, there was no question that people perceived Frank as an artist on the fringe. What fascinated him was that she saw herself as an outsider, too.

“I’m like the trunk of a cactus, I suppose,” she told him. “I take in a dose of culture and time with friends, then I retreat and go live on it for a while until I get thirsty again. It’s not good to live so much inside oneself. It’s a self-imposed exile, really. It makes you different.”

Their deep discussions were a stark contrast to her discourse with Edwin. It was when Mamah found herself saving up insights to tell Frank --- thoughts she never would have shared with her husband --- that she knew they’d grown too close.

By that time the two couples were good friends. When she understood how near to the edge she was walking, the house was nearly built. She had turned then toward Catherine to cultivate a closeness with her.

It was at the housewarming party that Mamah had invited Catherine to give a joint presentation on Goethe to the Nineteenth Century Woman’s Club. She understood now what she’d been doing. She had been using Catherine, quite unawares, as a buffer between herself and Frank.

Sinking into the bathwater, Mamah recalled one of her last meetings with him. The memory of it had been a private place she’d gone to again and again during the past couple of years. It was 1904; the house was nearly finished. She and Edwin and John were living in it by then. Frank was in the middle of building Unity Temple, far too busy to come by to settle the last few details of the house. Nevertheless, he had appeared one morning, plopped down some plans on the table, and said, “Let’s settle a few things.”

She had looked back at him innocently, though she’d been terrified that he might come forward with some declaration of his feelings.

“First of all, where on earth did you get a name like Mamah?”

She’d burst out laughing. “Strange, isn’t it? Well, my real name is Martha, but my grandmother started calling me Mamah when I was quite small. I think she made it up because it sounded French. She was French, you see, and descended from Philippe de Valois, Marquis de Villette --- a decorated officer of the Royal Military Order of Saint Someone or Other.”

“Is that where your gift for languages comes from?”

“That’s where it started. She insisted we speak French in the house when she was visiting.” Mamah had leaped up then. “Would you like to see her in a ball gown? I just came across a photo in one of the boxes.” She went into the bedroom, where the movers had put their things, and carried a box out to the dining room table.

Frank had laughed out loud when he saw the portrait. A delicate Marie Villette Lameraux sat in front of a painted backdrop of Mount Olympus in some long-ago photographer’s studio, her girlish personage festooned with garlands from the swirling braids over her ears to the loopy ribbons draped between rosettes on her gown. She stared grimly at the camera.

Frank was grinning when he stood up to peer into the box. “What else is in there?”

“Just some of my old things. Papers...”

He sat down again and looked at her. “Tell me everything,” he said.

Tell me everything. He might as well have said, “Take off your dress.” She had pulled one thing after another out of the box. She’d shown him her master’s-degree thesis and her graduation photograph. She’d talked of her years in Port Huron, teaching English and French at the high school with her college friend Mattie. She’d shown him photos of her family in front of their house on Oak Park Avenue.

“This must be you.”

“Uh-huh. This is my sister Jessie. She was the oldest.” Mamah pointed to the smiling sixteen-year-old and felt the familiar sad squeeze in her chest. “And Lizzie. Well, she looks just the same, doesn’t she? She’s the middle girl.”

Frank went back to the black-haired girl who struck such a confident pose, one hand holding a croquet mallet, a leg crossed jauntily in front of the other. “How old are you here?”

“Twelve.”

“Such pluck for a girl so young.”

“Oh, I was at just the right age then, I think. Smarter than I ever was before or since. There were no grays. I worshipped my father. I loved my dog. I adored reading.”

Mamah stared at the family picture. The sight of her and her sisters wearing middy blouses jogged another memory. “We were wild children, really. You see, my father was as an amateur naturalist. That was his great love, even more than the railroad. In summer he would take us down to a dry stream near Kankakee to hunt for fossils. It was an area where there had been a shallow sea in prehistoric times. He taught us to look very closely, and my eyes --- at least my near eyesight --- became quite acute. Nothing made me happier than crawling around the streambed for hours on end, looking for tiny patterns of shells in the rocks. My father always brought along a hammer. And when I cracked open a rock that looked promising --- when I actually found imprints left by creatures that lived there five hundred million years ago --- well, it was like opening up a whole world and falling right into it.” Mamah laughed. “It worried my mother to death.”

Frank looked surprised. “Why?”

“Because she preferred finding God in the second pew of Grace Episcopal Church. It unnerved her to see her daughters smashing rocks with hammers. She was wary of trilobites and Darwin and my father’s talk of the ‘human animal.’ And she thought I was far too... dreamy, I guess, or suggestible. I remember when my father brought home a telescope around this time. It was a good one, and he was excited to show us how it worked. That night we all went outside, and Jessie and Lizzie got to look through it first. They were awestruck by how many stars they could see with it. But after my mother had a good long look through it, I heard her say to my father, ‘Don’t show Mamah. It will be overwhelming for her.’ ”

Frank stared at her thoughtfully.

“It wasn’t too long after that that my mother took me in hand. My rock-smashing days ended, and dance lessons began. But by that point I was a bit of an odd one, not really interested in what most other girls cared about. I became something of an introvert, a bookworm, I guess you’d say.”

Mamah felt giddy at Frank’s attention, and a little embarrassed for revealing so much about herself. Yet she continued pulling things out of the box. “Another of my mother’s edification projects,” she explained, showing him the little German readers she had started with when she first learned the language. And then she showed Frank her birth certificate.

He held it up to the light. “June nineteenth, 1869,” he read. “Interesting. I was born June eighth of the same year.”

At any other moment, the remark might not have seemed unusual, but that afternoon, as they sat at the dining room table in the new house they had planned together, the coincidence struck Mamah as preordained. She wasn’t a superstitious person or particularly religious, but it seemed a kind of proof that they were meant to know each other, that fate had spat them out into the world at the same time, in nearly the same place, by design.

He looked at her graduation photo and spoke with sadness in his voice. “I wonder what my life would have been like if I had run into this young woman twenty years ago. To find someone so...” He paused. “I was a boy when I married Catherine --- just twenty-one. She was only eighteen. The marriage never should have been permitted, really. Now...” He looked away, sighed heavily.

When he turned his face back, it was etched with tenderness. He took her hand. “You are the loveliest woman I have ever known,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her cheek.

She let his mouth stay on her skin for a heartbeat before pulling away.


Excerpted from LOVING FRANK © Copyright 2008 by Nancy Horan. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.