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McCoy - 20

be pinned down about why he took one direction rather than another. At first, I had thought the pencil guided his thought, but in time I noticed that his fingers would sometimes begin to twitch and the fingers rub quickly over the thumb-- as his eyes fixed steadily. Once I asked, "What were you working on?" and he looked sheepish.

Questions about Wagner and Loos and Wright were not answered directly but in a chain of images. For one who was not notably verbal he could release images so intense that a whole scene or relationship was created. Once a few sentences in answer to a question about Loos's cafe-coterie evoked a group of students under his spell, walking on the Ring of a summer evening; I felt the cameraderie of the students, felt the warm air and smelled the leaves.

My next to last time in the office must have been 1948 because the Tischler house was under construction and Vick was working on the Ott house project. Vick and I had looked on while Schindler drew the Ott plan directly onto the engineer's contour map. He sat on the hard piano bench covered with cowhide, his back to the concrete wall panels, his hair wild, with the air of a terrier waiting for a stick to chase. And Vick holding the stick, feigning to throw it and suddenly pulling back. Schindler with one eye on the lines indicating rise and fall of the land, the other on the pencil drawing the plan, his mouth open for the laughter waiting to rush out, [[strikethrough]] he [[/strikethrough]] drew in eighth scale, stopping once to look for an eraser and seeing