You Say to Brick Page 3

  When this cable arrived, it was already late on a Sunday night—and not just any Sunday night, but Saint Patrick’s Day. A police car was dispatched to the Walnut Street address, where the officers found only a closed office building. They returned to the station and proceeded to forget about the notification. The cable from New York was left lying in the wrong box, and nobody paid any further attention to it for two full days. By the time the missing teletype was finally rediscovered, it had become obsolete.

  * * *

  About twenty minutes after hearing that Kahn was not in any hospital or morgue in New York City, Kathy Condé got another call from a different woman in New York, who informed her that Louis Kahn was dead. Kathy was told that the body had been taken to Missing Persons, located in a blue-brick building next to the Medical Examiner’s Office on First Avenue, and she was given a number to call. She called the number and gave Kahn’s description to the man at the other end; he confirmed that the body was there and that a telegram stating this would be sent to Mrs. Kahn, but he also said someone would have to come in person to make a positive identification. The office, he told her, would be open until 5:00 p.m.

  “Of course I went to New York to get Lou and here it was again confusion compounded upon confusion,” Esther wrote in a letter several months later, describing this series of events to an Italian friend of Kahn’s, “but I was assured he suffered only a very short time and he looked simply wonderful. If anyone can be said to look wonderful in death, he did.” She also noted in the letter that “Lou died in the arms of two policemen who were members of the rescue squad”—possibly Missing Persons’ kindhearted elaboration of the police report’s bare facts, or perhaps just Esther’s own version of the death as she pictured it.

  That Tuesday evening, Esther called her daughter at Bennington, where Sue Ann spent one night each week so as to teach a regular music class. Sue Ann was about to turn thirty-four. She was a professional flutist, married, living in New York, well aware of at least some of the difficulties in her parents’ marriage—an adult, in other words, not in immediate need of a father’s care. But the news was so upsetting and so unexpected that she barely retained a sense of the surrounding circumstances. “It was quite a shock,” she recalled nearly four decades later. “It was a long time before I came to grips with the fact that he was really dead.” Later, upon reflection, she modified her recollection: “I had a premonition. I remember at Christmas dinner he had turned very red”—but then she reversed herself again, adding, “It was a shock because everyone thought he was so vigorous.”

  There were still two other children to be notified, and Esther naturally did not consider this her job. Late that Tuesday afternoon, Kathy Condé called Harriet Pattison’s house. Calls had been going back and forth between Kathy and Harriet since Monday, because Harriet Pattison, in addition to being a landscape architect who worked with Louis Kahn’s firm, was known by everyone in the office to be the mother of his eleven-year-old son. The fact that Lou went out to Chestnut Hill practically every week to see the two of them, have dinner, and maybe spend part of the night was an accepted part of his routine; even Esther knew about the relationship, and would report to Sue Ann that Nathaniel was now taking violin lessons, for instance, or that Harriet was driving Lou crazy. So when Kahn didn’t show up at the office that Monday morning, Harriet’s was one of the first places Kathy had called. Now, however, she had to make a different and much harder call.

  Nathaniel was standing in the kitchen with his mother when she picked up the ringing telephone. “Is he dead?” Harriet asked. Then she quietly put the receiver back in its cradle. “She didn’t need to tell me,” Nathaniel said many years later. “I knew he was dead.” The two of them went outside and stood on the lawn near their neighbors’ house. It was almost spring, and the days were getting longer, but they could still feel a chill in the air as they watched the sun go down over the hill. “Will happy times ever come again?” Nathaniel asked.

  Nobody at Kahn’s office thought to call Anne Tyng. She hadn’t, after all, been working there regularly since the early 1960s. But Anne and Lou had stayed in close touch long after their sexual relationship had ended—in part because their daughter, Alexandra, brought them together, but also because they liked and respected each other. Even after Alex went away to college, they would occasionally see each other. Just recently, for instance, they had been looking at something together on the Penn campus, where both of them taught in the architecture school, and Lou had patted her affectionately and commented, not for the first time, “You never stop loving someone.”

  Now, on that Tuesday night, Anne got a phone call from the news director at a major Philadelphia radio station, a man who was the father of one of Alex’s high-school friends. News of Louis Kahn’s death had gone out over the wires, and this man, knowing of the family connection, wanted to make sure that Anne Tyng heard about it from him before she saw it on the television news or read about it in the next day’s paper. As soon as Anne got off the phone, she called Alex, who was a junior at Harvard. “My mother called me and I rushed home,” said the grown-up Alex Tyng, a painter, thinking back on these events nearly forty years later. “I just remember lying on my bed and thinking: Your father isn’t sick a day in his life and now he’s dead.”

  * * *

  The March 20 edition of The New York Times carried a front-page obituary by Paul Goldberger as well as an appreciation of Louis Kahn’s work written by Ada Louise Huxtable. Headlined “Kahn, a Blender of Logic, Power, Grace,” the Huxtable article singled out the Phillips Exeter Library, the capital buildings in Bangladesh, the Richards Medical Laboratories at Penn, and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth as examples of Kahn’s “strong and subtle” spaces. The Philadelphia Inquirer obituary that appeared that same Wednesday focused more on the strange circumstances surrounding his death, with a follow-up article on March 21 headed “Police Here Failed to Notify Wife of Kahn’s Death”; but the Inquirer also published an elegiac editorial in Thursday’s edition entitled “Louis Kahn, Fundamental Genius.” The Times obit listed only Esther and Sue Ann as Kahn’s survivors, while the Inquirer added in Lou’s sister, Sarah. Nowhere were the other two children mentioned.

  The office was deluged with phone calls, while telegrams addressed to Esther Kahn began to pour in at both the home and work addresses. Among them was a cable from the White House that began “It is with the deepest sense of grief that I learned of the passing of your husband Louis I. Kahn, one of America’s truly great architects” and ended with the signature “Richard Nixon.” Teddy Kollek wrote from Israel (“Deeply shocked. Louis’ death a tremendous loss to Jerusalem and the world”) and Isamu Noguchi from Japan (“The world shares your great loss”). Telegrams came from Nancy Hanks, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, and from Aaron Copland and John Hersey, in their roles as president and secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as from a wide range of Kahn’s fellow architects, including I. M. Pei, Kevin Roche, Carlo Scarpa, José Luis Sert, and Bob and Denise Venturi. The lengthiest and most detailed cable was from Buckminster Fuller, who wrote, among other things: “I first knew him when he was struggling through Depression days designing homes for the ILGWU. I watched him grow and grow as an architect and a philosopher … So long as any of his buildings stand, and most will stand for a long, long time, Lou will be speaking directly to the living humans whom he loved and who all loved him.”

  Meanwhile, plans went forward for the funeral, which had been announced for 10:00 a.m. on Friday the 22nd. Traditional Jewish law requires that the body be buried as soon as possible, preferably within twenty-four hours of death, but such speed is rare in the modern world, and Judaism allows its adherents to adapt to unusual circumstances. In this case, Louis Kahn was to receive a Jewish burial five days after he had died and three days after his body had been identified. He had never been a practicing Jew, but he had been married by a rabbi, and both his parents had been buried by rabbis; it
was assumed he would have wanted the same for himself. So a Society Hill rabbi who had never even met Lou was enlisted to conduct the service. A small list of pallbearers and a much longer list of honorary pallbearers were drawn up, and invitations were issued to the great and good of Philadelphia and beyond.

  The funeral was held at the Oliver Bair Funeral Home, a large neoclassical building located at 1820 Chestnut Street in the heart of old Philadelphia. The service itself was on the second floor, in the largest available chapel, with a side chapel reserved for the overflow crowd. Over a thousand people showed up at Bair’s on that Friday morning and mounted the grand staircase that led to the second floor. Most of them managed to crowd into the big main room, where Rabbi Ivan Caine—assisted by a Roman Catholic pastor, Monsignor John McFadden, who had actually known Lou—presided over the service. At the front of the room, the simple oak coffin rested on a pedestal covered with red velvet. Esther and Sue Ann sat in the first row. Around and just behind them were relatives and close friends, followed by the people who had worked at Kahn’s office and his colleagues from Penn. Dignitaries and architects from all over the world had arrived to pay their respects. But there were also numerous other guests who had no official standing and were simply drawn by their affection for Lou and his work. “There was this group of conservative old Jewish people and then there was a huge crowd of students, sort of hippie-ish, and they weren’t exactly dressed to the nines,” observed Ed Richards, a man who had worked in Kahn’s office for a few years in the early 1960s. “It was a very big crowd. I thought it was great, all the students.”

  Another of Kahn’s former employees, David Slovic, also remembered how crowded it was, and he even thought he recalled a slight scuffle—but whether that resulted from an attempt to keep someone out, or was simply due to competition for scarce seats, he couldn’t be sure. “I was kind of an outsider, no longer in the office,” he said. “I was not aware of the tensions: Esther trying to prevent them coming, and all the things I found out later.” But Jack MacAllister, a longer-term employee who had managed the Salk project for Kahn and had remained close to him even after starting his own practice in La Jolla, knew of the potential difficulties. “I was asked to go to the funeral, and I wisely did not go,” he remarked. “I saw it as a place where the vultures would be descending—all the people who wanted a part of him, or a part of the business. I heard that various members of the family didn’t want other members there.”

  A close friend of Esther’s named Anne Meyers—who was not only the wife of Kahn’s colleague Marshall Meyers, but also Esther Kahn’s informal financial advisor—said that Esther gave her rather explicit instructions in this regard. The other two children and their mothers were to be treated with respect if they insisted on coming to the funeral, but she did not want them sitting “in her line of sight.” So Angel Meyers, as she was called, tried to make sure that these unwanted guests were steered to the side chapel, from which the coffin was not visible but to which the speakers’ voices could be piped in.

  “I remember seeing a number of people seated up front, and knowing we were not going to be sitting there,” said the grown-up Nathaniel Kahn, reflecting back on the eleven-year-old self who had been through these experiences. “When you have these different families, there’s this sense that everyone is isolated in their own particular grief. And there’s this awkward sense that you’re being watched, that you’re not really supposed to be there. Somehow there’s this memory I have of being told to go into the side room. I remember not being able to see. There was a loudspeaker, a kind of walnut-cased cloth-covered speaker, through which I was hearing the proceedings. So there was this really disconnected sense—there was this random rabbi, who was saying really nice things but that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the father I knew.”

  Much more pertinent, from the young Nathaniel’s point of view, was the comment of the taxi driver who had brought his uncle Willy from the airport to the funeral home. When Willy Pattison (who, according to Nathaniel, “was definitely no fan of Lou’s”) met his sister and nephew at the top of the staircase inside Oliver Bair’s, he told them about the conversation he’d had in the cab. “Oh, you’re going to the funeral of the professor,” said the driver, adding: “We all knew him. He was a great man.” Nathaniel felt this opinion was confirmed by the line of taxis he had seen waiting outside the funeral home. They were “paying their respects,” he recalled, “like they wanted to be part of it: the taxi drivers all knew Lou, because he didn’t drive.” Inside the chapel, by contrast, there was only the disembodied voice of Rabbi Caine, telling anecdotes about the famous man he had never met. “It was like the voice of God coming through the speaker. It was surreal,” Nathaniel reflected. “It was kind of the beginning of having him taken away.”

  Alex Tyng, who was nearly nine years older than Nathaniel, handled the situation differently. Alex had always possessed a strong personality. It was she who, at the age of sixteen, had sought out both her younger half-brother and her older half-sister, forging enduring connections between the previously isolated families. Alex had also insisted on being present at various public occasions involving Lou, often bringing her little brother with her, as if to demonstrate that they too were part of Kahn’s life, despite all the subterfuges and concealments. And now, at her father’s funeral, she was not going to submit to being put in her place.

  “The funeral was actually on my birthday—I was twenty,” recalled Alex. “The same woman who was always trying to make us go to the back—she was the wife of someone who worked for him—tried to usher us into the side room. Actually, let me back up: she called our house before the funeral. I heard my mother talking to her and saying, ‘How could you tell us not to come?’ She was furious. So that kind of set up this anxious feeling in my stomach, since I knew I would have to contend with this force that would try to prevent us from sitting where we wanted to sit.”

  When Angel Meyers was unable to persuade Alex and Anne Tyng to go to the side room, she sat them at the very back of the main room—“even though my mother had worked in the office for years,” Alex pointed out. Anne Tyng remained at the back for the duration of the service. But Alex marched up to the front, where she was hailed by Harry Saltzman, Sue Ann’s husband, who was sitting in the second row.

  “When my sister came in, she came up to the front,” Sue Ann observed. “She’s not one to take any guff. My husband said to her, ‘Come sit with me—this is where all the good people are sitting.’ I went to find Harriet and she was in a side chapel.” Alex, too, went looking for Nathaniel at the same time.

  “Alex said did I want to come sit up front with her, but I wanted to stay with my mother,” Nathaniel recollected, and Alex remembered the same thing: “He felt he wanted to comfort his mother, which was really sweet. I felt a little guilty that I wasn’t sitting next to my mother and comforting her, but I knew she could take care of herself. I knew I would be really angry if I sat in the back, so I didn’t.”

  None of this family drama impinged in any noticeable way on the stately proceedings. “Rabbi Caine drew a similarity between Louis Kahn and the prophet Moses,” ran the fulsome report in that Friday’s Evening Bulletin, while “Kahn’s wife, the former Esther Israeli, sat in the front row in the ornate funeral parlor … surrounded by friends and relatives.” (“Esther was there as if she should have gotten an Academy Award” was Ed Richards’ unkinder take.) When the eulogies by Rabbi Caine, Monsignor McFadden, and Kahn’s old friend and fellow architect Norman Rice had been delivered, the coffin was solemnly carried out by the official pallbearers. The young Nathaniel was very impressed by the sight: “I remember seeing all the men from his office carry the casket down the steps on their shoulders”—though in fact only one of the pallbearers, David Wisdom, actually worked in Kahn’s firm. The others included Dr. Bernard Alpers, the neurologist who had employed Esther as his medical technician for most of her working life; David Zoob, Lou’s lawyer; Norman Rice, who had known
Lou since their boyhood; Charles Madden, a Philadelphia artist; and four other local dignitaries. Together they carried the plain wooden box down the sweeping staircase and out to the waiting hearse.

  About fifty cars followed the hearse to the Montefiore Cemetery in northeast Philadelphia. The Evening Bulletin was impressed not only by the number of vehicles, but by their variety: “Immediately behind a shiny black Mercedes was a well-used Volkswagen bus,” the reporter noted. Sue Ann and Alex rode separately but met up at the graveyard. “I remember Sue being upset,” said Alex. “She was holding my hand. I don’t know who was comforting who.” They didn’t let go even when they reached the grave itself. “We were supposed to put earth on the casket,” Alex recalled. “I had never been to a Jewish funeral before, so I didn’t know what to do, but she kind of showed me. We held hands and did it together.”