Bed and Breakfast at Cheney House, Oak Park, IL

Several years ago, in a Moment of Truth, I realized I had lived in Oak Park, IL for 35 years without reading a Hemingway book or visiting a Frank Lloyd Wright structure. The popular FLW Guided Tours had limited appeal since I have mixed feelings about eyeballing decor and being shuffled along relentlessly at the same time. Luckily, someone had come up with a better idea -- Dale Smirl had turned part of his FLW house into a bed-and-breakfast. It cost $166 a night -- a once-in-a-lifetime deal. I made a reservation, not without trepidations.

"I wonder if there will be a television set?" I fretted anxiously to a friend. "Don't worry, Anne" replied Fred, who continued ... "In a Frank Lloyd Wright house, you won't need a television."

The Cheney House (not to be confused with the Cheney Mansion of the same town) was located at 520 N. East Avenue within walking distance but a friend who was curious about the place drove me over and spent a few hours. Upon our arrival, I staggered a bit in confusion, wondering if this was the right address because at first I could hardly see a house at all. Unlike the sweeping grandeur of the FLW Studio and Home, the Cheney House was of the true Prairie school of architecture and so carefully designed to blend with the surrounding gardens that it took a minute to really focus on the building.

We used the keys Mr. Smirl had left to enter a spacious suite of rooms which included two bedrooms, a beautifully refinished bathroom with twin sinks, a huge living room with twin sofas facing each other in front of a fireplace and a small kitchen complete with a dining room table. The place abounded with Prairie style furniture, stained glass lamps and fancy window panes. Emergency exit instructions had been tastefully but prominently posted. (Fire has always been an issue with FLW buildings.) I dropped off my scant luggage and we went out to dinner. Mr. Smirl greeted us upon our return and showed us the main floor of the house.

My impression was that of a river of rooms, spilling into each other gracefully and without undue ripple. It was a lovely place and beautifully furnished but what I remember most was a gorgeous billiards table which had been part of the original furnishings. Mr. Smirl told us other things about the house but my predominant memory is his negative attitude about the bed and breakfast business. He complained at such length that I would have taken it personally if friends who stayed there a few months later hadn't reported the same thing. (It didn't surprise me to learn that Cheney House Bed and Breakfast has closed down since then.) Mr. Smirl couldn't show us the upstairs rooms which were occupied by guests from England but explained that the house had been designed with apartments in the basement for the Cheney family's visiting relatives and that I was staying in one of those guest quarters.

Later, back in my own basement "digs," my friend declined my invitation to spend the night and when I was alone, I gloried in wandering around, studying everything at my leisure. The lights had to be turned on and off a certain way. Sure enough, there was a television in the back bedroom but Fred was right, in all the time I was there I only watched five minutes of the Saturday night news. I was struck by the Oriental ambience and now remembered having seen groups of young Japanese students milling about in the area. I wondered if this was one of the places they had traveled half a world to see.

Meanwhile, upstairs mein host rattled around nonchalantly, no doubt taking all this majestic detail for granted. Later, he knocked on my door and gave me a shopping bag of breakfast goodies and a Sunday Tribune. The contents of the bag impressed me and if he was shopping for other guests too, I could see why he was getting tired of the bed-and-breakfast enterprise.

In addition to the newspaper, other reading material had been provided but it seemed as though I would start reading and my focus would be drawn to something else in the room - maybe the ceiling, a doorway or the windows. Reading I could do anytime but I probably would never get a chance to really see the interior of a FLW house again ... but it was more than that. This place seemed to have a spiritual effect on me. My visit there was very much like a spiritual retreat. Hardly anybody knew where I was nor did I communicate with anyone by phone. Aside from walking over to St. Edmund's the next day for Mass and bringing something back for my dinner, I was sheltered in the Cheney House for my visit. During the daylight hours, I snapped pictures (many of which didn't turn out well because the rooms were apparently much darker than I thought) but mostly I used the time to think, really think, about my own life and the other people who meant so much to me.

The Lady of the House

Most of all, I thought of Mameh (May-Ma) Cheney, who had begun life as Martha Borthwick. No bimbo or floozy she, but an intelligent, educated person and gifted linguist who had married well and had two children. Back then, a woman's career choice was to be married and raise a family. The perennial question "What's love got to do with it?" didn't necessarily have much to do with it. Grand passion may not have been a part of Mameh's game plan in 1903, when she and her husband commissioned the local famous architect to design a house for them, but she and Frank seemed to have hit it off from the start.

For intimate details, we must rely on fantasy or fiction (Loving Frank by Nancy Horan) but apparently Mameh and Frank got to be a habit with each other. In time, they abandoned their families and "ran off" together ... a crusade of love which ended up costing both so much that "What were they thinking?" becomes the paramount mystery. Mameh came in for the worst of the public opinion but they were both despised by many in a "flap" and uproar unequaled until 1951, when actress Ingrid Bergman abandoned her own family to elope with Roberto Rossellini.

Mameh and Frank evolved into globetrotters, living out of luggage and sometimes dangerously close to being broke, but eventually returning to Spring Green, WI, the area in which Wright had grown up. They settled in as he began work on his dream house, Taliesin (Shining Brow). Life wasn't perfect but they still loved each other and were doing okay despite overdue bills, unwanted publicity and unwelcomed attention from newspaper reporters.

The Butler Did It

Among the household staff they employed were Mr. and Mrs. Julian Carlton, a gifted cook and butler. Although his wife adjusted to the remote location and tightly knit household of Taliesin, Julian seemed to be a less than perfect fit who expressed escalating unhappiness, distress and mutinous rebellion. After Mameh made the mistake of giving the couple their notice when Frank was away in Chicago, something snapped and the deranged man axed Mameh and her children to death, along with four other victims and nearly burned Taliesin to the ground, crawling into the unlit furnace in the basement to hide.

What a madman had done to Mameh and her children is nothing compared to the post-mortem savaging from her erstwhile neighbors back in Oak Park. Everyone regretted what had happened to the innocent children but clearly they thought Mameh had got just what she deserved. Young Ernest Hemingway might have remembered this furor years later and perhaps that memory contributed to the famous crack he made about his home town in which he called Oak Park the "... village of broad lawns and narrow minds."

The Morning After

Early the next morning, I quietly let myself out, leaving the keys in the designated place. Outside, I used up the rest of my film, snapping here and there for all the world like a Japanese tourist myself. As I walked south past the house, I took one last shot (the picture illustrating this article). It turned out beautifully and I often study it to this day, because this is what Mameh Cheney must have seen when she walked away for the last time.

What she was thinking is anybody's guess.