Mabel, Me, and Sacred Houses

"What if it bleeds?" It was four in the morning. I reached over in the dark to the bedside table and clawed my trusty I6 toward me. Pulling the covers over my head so I wouldn't wake Michael, I Googled "living in a house made of Corten steel." Last week the penultimate design and budget for our house came in, the costs already over our original plan, with the only construction so far --  outside our architect's CAD program -- being a hole for the perc test to establish our septic field location. What if the Corten process doesn't work and the walls corrode into Swiss cheese before we get a chance to die and don't have the money to fix them?  What if it's like living in a drum?  What if it oozes rust all over the ground like some wounded robot? What about lightning?  What if it isn't sacred like Mabel Dodge Luhan's house? Because this is the house I really want.  I want a sacred house.  I want her house.

Mabel Dodge Luhan's adobe home was built around 1920 on the edge of Taos by her husband Tony Luhan, a Pueblo Indian, using no metal at all. The house appears to have been planted and grown from the New Mexican earth, a fairy tale string of adobe rooms tumbling off a central three-story structure, which holds Mabel and Tony's former bedrooms, the kitchen, and a cluster of small common rooms, warmed by the warm round bodies of kiva fireplaces.  The house survived ownership in the 1960s by Dennis Hopper and, now safely listed in the Historic Register, is a bed and breakfast with most of the furnishings and structures intact. 

 Mabel has been an alluring presence in my life since I was an upstate teenager reading a book about Greenwich Village in the early 20^th century.  The author described Mabel then-just-Dodge as a wealthy divorcee who held salons for all the famous writers, artists, and radicals of that time, whom I imagined sitting in her living room, drinking something dangerous, and being funny, wise, and socialist. I read this book in the late 1950's when Mabel was still alive.  I knew nothing of her subsequent home in Taos, New Mexico, where she died in 1962, and didn't for another thirty years.  At that time, I just wanted to be in New York, in the Village, in that apartment. And I didn't just want to be like Mabel Dodge.  I wanted to be her.

 

Mabel had been born rich and married richer twice before she started her New York salon. During that period, between lovers and trips to Paris and California, she married her third husband, the painter Maurice Stern, who, well-meaning but dim-witted, suggested that Mabel check out New Mexico and save Indians. So she went West and met Tony Luhan, a native of Taos Pueblo, whom she snapped up as her fourth husband, saving this Indian at least for herself and dumping Stern.  Tony built Mabel her wonderful adobe home, where she set herself up once again to attract even more artists and writers, this time to Taos, including D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, and George O'Keefe.

Judging from the old black and white photos of Mabel, it's difficult to imagine her seducing all those amazing men, not only her various husbands, but her many male and female lovers. Strong jawed, with banged-up flat-cut hair and androgynous outfits, Mabel was described by Georgia O'Keefe (who, to be fair, was at one point a rival for Tony – an unrepentant philanderer) as talkative and overbearing.  During one of her psychiatric sessions, Mabel  was advised by a Jungian analyst to control her overactive animus.

Although spending most of her time in Taos, Mabel still schlepped back in forth between east and west and remained a citiot.  She regarded the local Hispanics as "fatalistic, shiftless, and driven in their religious rites by masochism," while they were put off by her affairs and multiple marriages and the rumor that she was responsible for the invasive sunflowers, brought from the east and overwhelming their crops. Although Mabel became involved in conserving tribal culture, Tony told her at one point that "Indians didn't like her either". Mabel described their relationship with her as being "merely polite or not even polite with me, indifferent  – apart – as though leaving me to stew in my own poison."

Nevertheless, her own writings suggest a woman trying very hard to dope things out within the context of her own culture and time and seeking to think beyond their barriers. Her writing is observant, reflective, and she doesn't hesitate to make fun of herself and her own behavior. After reading them, I still wanted to be like her.

Michael grew up in Albuquerque and after we met in the late eighties, I went with him to New Mexico for the first time.  It was August, and we drove north to Taos and stayed at Mabel's house. I was having difficulties dealing with my corporate life at the time, running a failing division that I couldn't kick back into the previous and now impossible level of profitability desired by my masters. I took my spreadsheet (paper at that time) with its nasty numbers out onto the patio in front of Mabel's adobe building, and fretted over their inability to levitate.   And, then, suddenly those numbers did.  They drifted up out of my consciousness and dissolved into that shockingly clear blue sky. The suffocating noose of anxiety released, no longer knotted by the cultural fallacy of the Hallowed Career.  I breathed in. I was at once done with this life. It took me another couple years to find the work I wanted, but it began there, in Mabel Dodge's sacred front yard.

This year over Christmas week, we reserved four rooms there, including Mabel's bedroom for ourselves, to celebrate our 25^th anniversary. We managed to corral 4 out of 5 offspring and 2 out of 5 grand offspring to come with us.  Scattered among Mabel's and Tony's adobe rooms and cottage for two days and nights, our discordant but wonderful family sat by the many kivas, constantly fired up to warm the bedrooms and the small, magically comfortable common rooms, talking religion, politics, and movies and celebrating our anniversary.  We only left to eat at night in town or to walk (illegally) during the day out of the back gate on to the snowy desert owned by the Taos Pueblo, throwing snowballs and listening in vain for the hum from the Magic Mountains. With nine extended family members glued at the hip we did pretty well.  Everyone is still talking to each other. The only downside, Michael and I couldn't use the bathroom adjoining Mabel's bedroom, where the sun still plays through D.H. Lawrence's skill-less playful paintings that he splashed across the windows.  This belonged to the lucky guests who took Tony's room above Mabel's, where a skylight over his bed opened up to the stars. 

Driving back to Albuquerque down the state highway between the steep sides of its bluff with their harrowing boulders about to lurch down on our heads, we emerged from them to confront the huge sky rising across the desert.  I thought, "So, I could live here." But I don't.  I live in Hudson.  It's too late for Taos.

In some ways, though, I've lived a Mabelish life. Like her, at times a total jerk and without being a great beauty, I've been multi-married with more than my share of affairs and at one point could have been accused of having an overactive animus.  If I haven't run salons for famous artists, I've fed dinner to a number of funny smart people.  I've left the city to create a more natural life, and my third husband may even have a bit of Apache in his DNA. The house that we're building will rest in a hollow, and even though it's not next to a reservation, it will be the neighbor to Olana, Frederick Church's estate with its Victorian folly overlooking the Hudson River and our tract of preserved land.  Our house will be made of steel and glass – not mud -- but we'll have solar electricity and geo-thermal heat. And the steel is Corten, which will react with the sun and the rain so its surface will rust, a mottled sienna color like the earth, protecting the walls and rooms within it.  Maybe it will be sacred in a funky techie way. Maybe Mabel and Tony would have liked it. In any case, we'll have lightning rods.