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.
