A Death in Pilsen

Chapter 24

Fergus Fahey and I never spoke about Edwina or Marge or Charlie, not a single word. I didn’t want to bring the subject up, and I’m sure he didn’t, either. I wondered if he ever hauled Charlie in for questioning after the suicide, but I figured he — and the department — were happy to close the case with Marge’s death and written confession.

After all, what could they have charged Charlie with, anyway? He really hadn’t done anything but possibly encourage Marge’s actions by his rejection of her. If that were a crime, new prisons would have to be constructed every month.

I never saw my cousin again. I did forward Liam McCafferty’s hefty bill to him, though, and can only assume that he paid it, since I never heard from the celebrated lawyer. Charlie sent us Christmas cards for a couple of years, but then stopped, probably because we didn’t reciprocate.

I learned from another cousin that he had gotten married and was living in a bungalow in some western suburb, Brookfield I think it was, or maybe North Riverside. And then I heard later that he’d gotten divorced and had moved into an apartment in that area. To lift a line from the end of a book by Scott Fitzgerald that I read once, “in any case, he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.”

Peter got his summer internship at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin up in the Wisconsin countryside. The architect had held true to his promise to make an exception for him after my long interview with him ran in the Sunday Tribune — with color photographs of Wright at work, as well as shots of his Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania and his Johnson’s Wax headquarters in Racine, Wis. I even got a handwritten letter from the man himself, acknowledging that my article, which was by no means fawning, “was pretty much on the mark, at least as far as it went.”

He did take issue with one line in the story, however, in which I wrote that Wright “was in the very front rank of American architects, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Edward Durrell Stone, and Eero Saarinen.”

“I am the front rank of American architects, period!” Wright fired back the very next day, adding that “None of them is even fit to carry my t-square.”

Peter said the Taliesin experience overall was a good one, even though he spent much of his time doing such menial chores as slopping hogs and building a henhouse as part of the regimen at that unorthodox communal enclave, where everybody was expected to get their hands dirty.In the asset column, Wright wrote in the same letter that “Your lad acquitted himself well here and was a hard worker. We can only hope that on his return to that cow college mired in the Illinois cornfields, he will resist the pedestrian design suggestions and theories of his instructors.” Wright himself had critiqued Peter’s drafting exercises and even complimented him on preliminary sketches he had done of a proposed single-family home, a home that Peter says he plans to build one day for himself and the wife he has yet to meet.

Also on the plus side, the experience earned him some stature when he returned to the architecture school at the University of Illinois the following fall. This despite the fact that some of the professors viewed Wright as unorthodox, eccentric, and even a “charlatan,” as one faculty member termed him.

But Peter said that, to a man, his instructors were impressed that he had gotten an inside look at the workings of this singular fellowship and the self-proclaimed “greatest architect in the world” who presided over his pastoral realm like a feudal lord.