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  “Please, Rachida, I don’t have camp tomorrow.”

  “How many people of color are slaughtered in this thing?” Rachida asks.

  “There are ways of seeing the film that transcend the old cowboys-and-Indians genre. It’s really a profound critique of racism, about Ethan Edwards’s projection of the savage part of himself onto the Native Americans.”

  “Pleeeeese … pretty please with a cherry on top.” Omar holds up his hand. “I give my word of honor.”

  “It’s scary,” Adam says, “but nothing is really shown.”

  “I’ll cover my eyes if it’s inappropriate.”

  “Why don’t you get into your pj’s and brush your teeth first,” Myra suggests.

  Adam heads upstairs to help Omar and to get the video set up in the music room while Myra goes out to water her garden. Rachida says she has to make a work call, leaving Caro to help Eva with the dishes.

  Caro assumes the position at the sink, rinsing the dishes and them handing them to Eva to load into the dishwasher. She can see her mother in the garden below moving among the plant beds with her snaky hose. Leaning over to prune the white begonias, her mother appears in the soft dusk slender and limber as a girl.

  Stuffed with the macaroni and cheese, Caro feels old and heavy. She watches her mother rewind the hose and then disappear, heading inside, Caro assumes, through the doors to her office. A few minutes later, Caro hears her mother’s steps on the front stairs, and then the piano as she begins to play.

  “Your mother, she plays so beautifully,” Eva says. She looks at Caro shyly. “I never hear anyone play so beautifully.”

  “She does.” Caro listens, trying to identify the music—one of the Bach Inventions. Despite her persistent efforts, her mother had not been able to get either of her children to stick with an instrument. Adam had hung in for two years of clarinet, before hurling it on the floor in a moment of frustration. Caro had quit the guitar after six months of lessons, during which she’d developed painful calluses and failed to tune the damn thing.

  For her fiftieth birthday, her mother, having never played anything more than a schoolgirl’s “Chopsticks,” bought herself a grand piano. Even the bow-tied salesperson questioned the purchase; perhaps, he suggested, she would like to rent a console on which to take her first lessons. Her mother was resolute. She had already found a teacher, an Austrian man who’d looked at her hands and had her sing the melody of a Chopin waltz before declaring that she would be playing the Mozart Sonata in C by the end of a year.

  On the day the piano arrived, her mother began her practice schedule: one hour, five nights a week. Indeed, by the end of her first year of study, she was playing the easy Mozart sonatas, Beethoven’s “Für Elise,” and the Chopin Waltz in A Minor.

  The first time Caro heard her mother play, she was filled with wonder tinged with a strange resentment. Glancing up from the keys, her mother had seen Caro’s expression.

  “Yes?” her mother said, placing her hands in her lap.

  “I can’t believe how well you play. After so little time.”

  Her mother raised her eyebrows.

  “It’s a little overwhelming to have a mother who can do so many things. It leaves me feeling like a klutz.”

  On her mother’s face was a familiar quizzical look whose melancholic undertones, depending on Caro’s mood, provoked the wish either to get away as fast as possible or to wrap her arms around her mother. “You were lucky,” Caro said. “All your mother could do was clean.”

  “Very lucky. All I ever saw was my mother’s backside sticking up in the air as she crawled around on her hands and knees scouting for dirt.”

  Caro smiled, imagining her shrunken, dour grandmother. “But if it were you, it would be a perfect backside that would make mine look enormous in comparison.”

  “Oh yes, my pathetic daughter. Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, director at twenty-six of a preschool she’s since made nationally renowned.”

  “Seriously, Mom, how do you do it?”

  Myra closed her music books. She set them on the side of the music stand. “Once you learn to apply yourself, to dig deep and push for excellence, you can do it with anything: cooking, gardening, writing. It’s like learning to use a muscle—only this is a psychological muscle.”

  “How come I don’t have it?”

  Her mother hesitated, as though debating if she should acknowledge that it is true that Caro has never done anything that has required her to apply herself 100 percent. “Everything you’ve done, you’ve been able to do with a small piece of yourself. It’s a different experience when you have to use every fiber of your being.”

  “So how did you learn?”

  Her mother came to sit next to her on the couch. She picked up Caro’s hand and, sensing no resistance, held it lightly. “Actually,” she said, “it was with you. When you were a baby. You were a little colicky, not terribly so, and it didn’t last that long, but I was very anxious, which you sensed, and that made you even fussier. Your father was a resident and hardly home. On a resident’s salary, we couldn’t even consider babysitting help. I didn’t understand then that the real problem was my own lack of experience being mothered. I had to figure out how to soothe you, on no sleep, with no inner model or help. That was the first time I had to dig deep. I did it again with your brother, and then again when I wrote my thesis. Eventually, it became ingrained, a way of being.”

  Caro hands the last of the dinner plates to Eva. There is an almost ecstatic look on Eva’s face as she glances up at the ceiling through which Myra’s playing can be heard. “Your mother, Omar wants her to teach him. Do you think she will let me watch?”

  Caro imagines her mother on the piano bench, Omar beside her looking down at the keys, Eva on a nearby chair with her eyes fixed on them. The image leaves her with a queasy feeling. “You’ll have to ask her.”

  She gives Eva the dishwasher detergent and turns to scrubbing the sink.

  24

  The Searchers begins with TEXAS 1868 against a black background.

  “It was filmed in Monument Valley,” Adam whispers to Caro. “Do you remember, we went there once with Dad?”

  “In Arizona?”

  “Ford, the director, loved Monument Valley. It was totally unspoiled in the fifties, the farthest point anywhere in the country from a railroad. He thought the landscape looked more like Texas than Texas itself. He would set up tent cities and live out on the desert with his actors and crew. He and John Wayne were great buddies. They’d finish a bottle of wine together and then spend a couple of hours smoking cigars and playing cards.”

  Last summer, Adam had taken Rachida and Omar on a long-planned car trip from Detroit to Riggins, Idaho, with the intention of showing his wife and son the land he mythologized in the Westerns he wrote for third-world markets. The week before they left, wildfires had broken out, ravaging hundreds of thousands of acres of land. Crushed at the idea of canceling the trip, Adam had convinced Rachida to persevere. They arrived in Montana to find that entire mountainsides had burned in a matter of days and flames were leaping across Route 80. The craggy peaks of the Crazy Mountains, usually crystalline clear in August, were hidden by sooty gray sky.

  The trip culminated with a rafting sojourn on the Salmon River led by a guide Adam had found on the Internet: a former Deadhead turned ardent Native Americanist who met them dressed in a blue loincloth, his hand-crafted drums under one arm. On their first day, they drifted past hills orange with flame, the fleeing elk and deer and moose racing along the banks of the river. Late afternoon, the Deadhead guide set up camp on a sandy beachhead. Omar raced up the dunes, whooping as he flung himself down the mounds of white sand, while Adam squinted into the smoke at prop planes passing overhead.

  “Smoke jumpers from the McCall base,” the Deadhead told Adam. “Headed into the Nez Percé.”

  “Smoke jumpers?”

  “Guys who jump into fires so they can fight them inside out.”

  “Prett
y heroic.”

  “Yup. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them.”

  “And the rest?”

  “Don’t quote me. Let’s just say it might not be past a disgruntled guy to add a few days’ work by dropping a burning briquette on the way to a jump site.”

  In the middle of the night, Adam awoke to a red glow hovering over the ridge of the opposite bank of the river and Omar’s cheeks dusted with ashes. Back in Detroit, there was a letter from his mother with a copy of an editorial she’d clipped on the misguided zealousness of the old Smokey Bear policy: the snuffing out of all fires had prevented the natural clearing of the underbrush by smaller conflagrations, leaving a tinderbox primed to set off the inferno then taking place. Across the top of the Smokey Bear clipping, she’d printed in her precise hand The Tragedy of Good Intentions.

  Adam picks up the remote. “This shot here, wait, I’ll stop it.”

  He hits the pause button, freezing an image of a woman, her back to the camera, framed by a rough-hewn doorway, her eyes presumably locked on something she sees in the distance.

  “If you’re going to butcher this by talking through the whole thing and stopping it every five seconds, I’m going to go take a shower,” Rachida says.

  Myra surveys her family. Her grandson is lying on the couch with his head in her lap, his legs propped on Eva’s thighs. Rachida is perched on the desk chair, no longer looking at the screen. Caro sits in the velvet wing chair with her feet up on the piano bench. Adam, still standing, is fiddling with the remote.

  In the next scene, the reverend, who is also the captain of the Texas Rangers, arrives to round up volunteers for a band of men to retrieve some stolen cattle. The reverend stares into the camera while the departing Ethan Edwards bends to tenderly kiss his brother’s wife on the brow. Again, Adam stops the film. “The entire motivation for the film is captured in this frame.”

  Rachida stands. Myra exchanges glances with her daughter. Caro shrugs her shoulders. Oblivious, it seems, to Rachida’s departure, Adam restarts the film, which, like the mood in the room, is taking a darker and darker cast as the fear of an Indian raid falls over the adults who have remained to tend to the homestead. Realizing what her parents are suspecting, the older daughter, a teenager, breaks into an eye-popping scream.

  Myra looks at Omar and then at Adam to see if he wants to stop the movie, perhaps it is too much for a six-year-old, but Adam’s gaze is fixed on the screen. The phone rings. Before Myra can untangle herself from Omar to get it, the ringing stops.

  Forty miles away, Ethan, with inhuman calm, informs the search party that they have been duped: the cattle theft, he understands now, was a ploy to draw them away from the homestead so the remaining settlers could be ambushed. In an excruciating display of discipline, Ethan waters and feeds his exhausted horse before beginning the long journey back to his brother’s family.

  To Myra’s relief, Omar turns inward on the couch. With his deepening breath, he appears to be falling asleep. Myra strokes her grandson’s dark head of hair, her fingers massaging his scalp. She can’t shake the thought that Rachida picked up the phone knowing the call would be for her—her angry departure over Adam’s annotations a ploy like the cattle theft.

  Eva has drawn her knees up to her chest and is chewing a finger.

  As Ethan approaches the homestead, the camera cuts away from John Wayne’s face to the valley below. A red swatch of flame defines the roof of the burning homestead, drawing nearer and nearer with each pound of the horse’s hooves.

  Eva gasps. She buries her face between her knees.

  TWO

  1

  For as long as Adam can remember, there has been a divide in the family about the house his father’s father, Max, commenced building the year he turned fifty-one. The divide, Adam has come to understand, is, in fact, about Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Wisconsin Taliesin home was its inspiration—to the ire of Adam’s grandmother, Ida, prime minister of the hate-the-house or, more precisely, hate-Frank-Lloyd-Wright faction of the family, his father, Larry, her secretary of state. Once Adam reached an age when he could verbalize an opinion, he became his grandfather’s most vociferous ally in support of the house, an attitude he only later understood he had absorbed from his mother’s quiet admiration for the sentiments of his grandfather which the house embodied. In Adam’s case, though, his allegiances are seen as of questionable motive. As his father is fond of saying, Adam would have become a cannibal had Larry been a vegetarian.

  Max, who died five years ago, had made by the standards of the family a substantial amount of money as an entertainment lawyer with a client list that Ida, dead herself now for nearly two years, never missed an opportunity to report had included at various times Zero Mostel, Dean Martin, and Doris Day. His own father had been a diamond merchant in Frankfurt who came to America in the 1880s and opened a jewelry store in South Orange, New Jersey, on whose bread-and-butter trade of gold wedding bands, silver charm bracelets, and sensible watches he raised three sons who went on to become a rabbi, a teacher, and, in Max’s case, a lawyer.

  As a young man, Max had been dapper and dilettantish, in love with cloisonné pens and platinum cuff links, limited-edition pocket knives, engraved leather folios. By the time Larry was old enough to play in his father’s dressing room, there were shelves of Italian-made shoes, drawers of silk pajamas, and a cedar closet housing baskets of cashmere socks, piles of merino wool sweaters, a collection of fox-lined hats.

  Then everything changed. The change took place almost overnight. It was the spring of 1952, and Max had taken his family—Ida, unhappy that they were not going to Palm Beach; Larry, an awkward and moody thirteen; and Henry, then nine—to Phoenix, where he had business to conduct for a client. The client invited all of them to his home, a house, it turned out, that had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was unlike anything any of them had ever seen: low to the ground, with cement panels and periwinkle-blue beams and ceiling-to-floor glass windows—an abode that Ida politely complimented to the owner’s face but later declared to be the ugliest house ever built.

  Standing inside, looking out at the green lawn and the palm trees and the desert sky, Max, a man who until that moment had been an unadvertised atheist, felt for the first time that he had seen God—seen that the duty of mankind is to honor nature and to live in harmony with the earth and all her creatures. Simultaneously shattered and filled with joy, he’d experienced in his bones the paradox of the infinitesimal scale of each human being, the earth itself but a speck of dust in the universe, existing in concert with the infinite potential of each individual.

  On his arrival home, Max vowed to live the rest of his years clothed in what he already owned. To Ida’s horror, he donated his silk pajamas and platinum cuff links and Hermès cravats to the used-clothing store run by the local B’nai B’rith ladies (from which she secretly reclaimed the cuff links for her sons), keeping for himself seven changes of clothing for each season, which he wore until they were threadbare. A month later, on a Thursday morning, he left his Riverdale home, as he did every weekday, in his yellow Cadillac. Instead of turning south toward his office in the Flatiron building, he drove north along the Taconic Parkway into the Catskills, where he remained alone for three nights, purchasing before his return an eighteen-acre lot in the township of Willow, with the intention, he informed Ida, of having Frank Lloyd Wright design them a home.

  Max commenced a correspondence with the eighty-four-year-old Wright, their exchange of letters, which he showed Adam, mired in Max’s elegiac descriptions of the mountain vistas and Wright’s compulsive iterations of his contractual policies. After one visit to the bug-infested land over a particularly rainy June week during which the family stayed at a dingy hotel with lumpy mattresses and attended a cacophonic atonal concert at a nearby avant-garde music colony, Ida dug in her heels, refusing to discuss the construction of anything in what she called that godforsaken corner of the world. By the time Max was able to convince her that a nearby
country home would be nice for the boys, Wright had died and his sons were both already in college. Never having wavered from the vision he’d had on the Arizona trip, Max hired an architect who had spent a brief time at Wright’s Arizona studio, Taliesin West. The architect designed a hodgepodge Prairie and Usonian house with signature Wrightian features, such as casement windows that opened wide enough for a small person to be able to crawl in and out, and a cruciform design centered on a flagstone fireplace.

  Unfortunately, what was primarily needed was a proper siting of the house on the property, which was adjacent to a pond that, in the summers, attracted wild geese whose abundant fecal deposits drew all species of flying insects, including mosquitoes, wasps, and bees that nested in the low eaves formed by the flat roof. Without a basement, the flagstone floor remained damp spring, summer, and fall, with pods of black mold forming in the corners. Winters, the subfloor would constrict and thin slivers of ice would push through the blackened grout.

  When Larry and Myra married, in 1967, Ida had already ceased her visits to the house. Although Max maintained a stubborn allegiance to the property, which he’d named Max’s Tali in homage to Wright’s Taliesin (a name which he pretended not to know was twisted by his sons into Max’s Folly), he was beginning to appear worn down by the seamless way the never-quite-completed construction had merged into ceaseless repairs of termite-ridden beams and rusting casement hinges.

  On Myra’s first night at the house, the August before she married Larry, she donned the obligatory bug spray and joined Max on the terrace, while Larry stayed inside watching a baseball game. It was too overcast to see the moon or the stars, the air somehow both muggy and chilly, the only sound that of the mosquitoes sizzling as they flew into the citronella candles. In his soon-to-be daughter-in-law, Max found an open ear for his thoughts about Frank Lloyd Wright as a descendant of Emerson and Thoreau and a recipient of the most elevated strains of Americanism—an Americanism not about property and a New World Industrial Revolution but about the nation as the embodiment of an ideal in which spirit and equality reigned supreme over tradition and greed. It was the first time Myra had ever considered the possibility that being an American was something to cultivate and honor. For her own perpetually exhausted father, America had been a place to get ahead, the home of a grim, godless modernity, an idea about which he’d had neither the energy nor the inclination to attach any moral valence.