In 1971, we moved west, and my father designed the house that had been sitting in his head for years, a Wrightian gem that sat in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. All of our bedrooms were small and functional, like Wright’s, and the main floor was communal and soaring and bright.
On our third-to-last day in Pittsburgh, my father and I drove to Fallingwater with the faint hope of good news. The road was blocked, and a woman with a walkie-talkie stood guard. She leaned into the window like a state trooper and we feared the worst, but she told us it would be reopening the next day. My father grasped her hand and said, “You don’t know how happy this has made me.” He made reservations for 9:30 a.m. I was overjoyed as well, and filled with profound relief. Our quest now had a restored purpose: it wouldn’t join the litany of rained-out baseball games, postponed fishing trips, deferred ski vacations, and unbuilt Lego castles that haunt the larger father-son narrative out there.
The next morning, we joined a group that walked down the path through the woods until Fallingwater’s epic balconies came into sight and the house took on the quality of a mirage. We toured its rooms and paced the balconies. Beneath them, the famous waterfall flowed, moving under the house and spilling out with its trademark drama.
The guide gave us a circumspect history of Fallingwater’s inhabitants. She didn’t tell us about Edgar Sr.’s heroic philandering, which approached the cartoonish at times. He once took a troupe of Ziegfeld girls to Atlantic City for the weekend, and boldly named his illegitimate daughter after his mother. By the early 1950s, his mistress, who had the wonderfully Dickensian name of Grace Stoops, was a regular fixture at the home. In September 1952, Liliane Kaufmann fell unconscious at Fallingwater and died after being rushed to a Pittsburgh hospital. The doctor determined that the cause of death was Seconal, a sleep medication. Edgar died three years later of bone cancer, shortly after marrying his mistress.
After his parents’ deaths, Edgar Jr. refashioned their family life into a harmonious unit set in that idyllic place. He renamed his mother’s separate bedroom “the master bedroom,” and called his father’s bedroom “the dressing room,” implying a conjugal bliss that had been absent throughout the marriage. His father had complained that Edgar Jr. “refused to be a son,” and Edgar Sr. wasn’t much of a father. Edgar Jr. put a bust of himself on his father’s desk and hung a portrait of the three of them on the wall. He removed Frida Kahlo’s sexually charged paintings (perhaps a reminder of his father’s libidinous nature), and finally donated the house to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. Over the years, roughly three million visitors have toured this, one of America’s most famous houses, marvelling at its ingenuity and detail, and soaking up the warmth of its stone hearth.
While we were in Pennsylvania pondering the transformative qualities of architecture, my brother was beginning to embrace the idea of his own death. David didn’t show up for his first day of work at the bookstore. He hadn’t come home the previous night either. He was seen around Whitehorse over the next two days, at the Blue Moon Saloon and coming out of a bank. Everyone agreed that he was in good spirits. David was last seen at the 98, the final stop in a descending order of local bars.
On December 2, his truck was spotted at a rest stop on the Alaska Highway forty kilometres south of town, beside the Yukon River Bridge. A woman who used to work with him saw it and assumed it had broken down. She saw it again eight days later, and the rcmp were notified. They drove to the bridge and found the truck under a light dusting of snow, almost out of gas, unlocked, the window rolled down. More ominous, they found two empty bottles of Nytol on the seat, and David’s cowboy hat sitting on the ground near the river. (He had worn a cowboy hat for the past twenty years.) They searched with dogs and an airplane, and would have searched the river but, already half covered in ice, it was inaccessible. The river search would have to wait until spring.
People go north to reinvent themselves, to become the person they felt was stifled in Toronto or Ohio or Aberdeen. Not everyone embraces its specific charms, and they return after the first dark winter and put on their old lives the way you put on a wet bathing suit. I had assumed David would come back, defeated by the cold if nothing else, but he didn’t. He stayed for twenty years. The North is filled with missing persons, people who have fled marriages, jobs, eastern complacency, the law, alimony payments, and themselves, and now my brother was officially listed as one of them.
In that grim lacuna between information and rumour, we waited. I talked to the rcmp, to his wife, his friends, and former bandmates, sifting through the contradictory portrait that emerged. He had habits that grew over the past decade, or had been clean for two years. He was slipping. He was finally happy. He was desperately unhappy and feeling trapped. He was faithful, had had affairs, was in debt. David had an actor’s ability to present an untroubled facade, and a gift for compartmentalization. In the evenings, I phoned people in Whitehorse, cataloguing the various Davids, assembling my blood.
Christmas passed with its wounds, and my family was forced to contemplate three scenarios. The most optimistic was that David had decided to start a new life, a northern prerogative, to simply light out. This, alas, was the least likely, though some of his friends held to it in the spirit of northern bravado, and he was reportedly seen in Alaska, in Vancouver, and in Mexico, living the good life. The second was foul play, the phrase still used to soften the dreadful connotations. The third was that he had taken his own life. All three had some support from people who had known him, and all three possessed gaps in logic if the evidence was examined closely, but I reluctantly drifted to the third, compelled to fill that awful silence with something. Thus began the attenuated death of my brother.
