Free Tinderbox by Lisa Gornick Page B

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