If Angels Fight

by Richard Bowes

  Where the road swept between the mountain and the sea, Julia turned onto a long driveway and stopped at the locked gates. Atop a rise stood Joyous Garde, all Doric columns and marble terraces. Built at the dawn of America’s century, its hundred rooms overlooked the ocean, “One of the crown jewels of Olympia Drive.”

  Joyous Garde had been closed and was, in any case, not planned for convenience or comfort. Julia was expected. She beeped and waited.

  Welcoming lights were on in Old Cottage just inside the gates. Itself a substantial affair, the Cottage was on a human scale. Henry and Martha Eder were the permanent caretakers of the estate and lived here year round. Henry emerged with a ring of keys and nodded to Julia.

  Just then, she caught flickering images of this driveway and what looked at first like a hostile, milling mob.

  A familiar voice intoned. “Beyond these wrought iron gates and granite pillars, the most famous private entryway in the United States, and possibly the world, the Macauley family and friends gather in moments of trial and tragedy.”

  Julia recognized the speaker as Walter Cronkite and realized that what she saw was the press waiting for a story.

  Then the gates clanged open. The grainy vision was gone. As Julia rolled through, she glanced up at Mt. Airey. It rose behind Joyous Garde covered with dark pines and bright foliage. Martha Eder came out to greet her and Julia found herself lulled by the old woman’s Down East voice.

  Julia had brought very little luggage. When it was stowed inside, she stood on the front porch of Old Cottage and felt she had come home. The place was wooden-shingled and hung with vines and honeysuckle. Her great-grandfather George Lowell Stoneham had built it seventy-five years before. It remained as a guest house and gate house and as an example of a fleeting New England simplicity.

  2.

  George Lowell Stoneham was always referred to as one of the discoverers of Mt. Airey. The Island, of course, had been found many times. By seals and gulls and migratory birds, by native hunters, by Hudson and Champlain and Scotch-Irish fishermen. But not until after the Civil War was it found by just the right people: wealthy and respectable Bostonians.

  Gentlemen, such as the painter Brooks Carr looking for proper subjects or the Harvard naturalist George Lowell Stoneham trying to loose memories of Antietem, came up the coast by steamer, stayed in the little hotels built for salesmen and schooner captains. They roamed north until they hit Mt. Airey.

  At first, a few took rooms above Baxter’s General Provisions And Boarding House in Penoquot Landing. They painted, explored, captured bugs in specimen bottles. They told their friends, the nicely wealthy of Boston, about it. Brooks Carr rented a house in the village one summer and brought his young family.

  To Professor Stoneham went the honor of being the first of these founders to build on the island. In 1875, he bought (after hard bargaining) a chunk of land on the seaward side of Mt. Airey and constructed a cabin in a grove of giant white pine that overlooked Mirror Lake.

  In the following decades, others also built: plain cabins and studios at first, then cottages. In those days, men and boys swam naked and out of sight at Bachelors’ Point on the north end of the island. The women, in sweeping summer hats and dresses that reached to the ground, stopped for tea and scones at Baxter’s, which now offered a shady patio in fine weather. There, they gossiped about the Saltonstall boy who had married the Pierce girl then moved to France, and about George Stoneham’s daughter Helen and a certain New York financier.

  This filet of land in this cream of a season did not long escape the notice of the truly wealthy. From New York they came, and Philadelphia. They acquired large chunks of property. The structures they caused to rise were still called studios and cottages. But they were mansions on substantial estates. By the 1890s, those who could have been anywhere in the world chose to come in August to Mount Airy.

  Trails and bridle paths were blazed through the forests and up the slopes of the mountain. In 1892, John D. Rockefeller and Simon Garde constructed a paved road, Olympia Drive, around the twenty-five mile perimeter of the island.

  Hiking parties into the hills, to the quiet glens at the heart of the island, always seemed to find themselves at Mirror Lake with its utterly smooth surface and unfathomable depths. The only work of man visible from the shore, and that just barely, was Stoneham Cabin atop a sheer granite cliff.

  Julia Garde Macauley didn’t know what caused her great-grandfather to build on that exact spot. But she knew it wasn’t whim or happenstance. The old tintypes showed a tall man with a beard like a wizard’s and eyes that had gazed on Pickett’s Charge.

  Maybe the decision was like the one Professor Stoneham himself described in his magisterial Wasps of the Eastern United States. “In the magic silence of a summer’s afternoon, the mud wasp builds her nest. Instinct, honed through the eons, guides her choice.”

  Perhaps, though, it was something more. A glimpse. A sign. Julia knew for certain that once drawn to the grove, George Stoneham had discovered that it contained one of the twelve portals to an ancient shrine. And that the priest, or the Rex , as the priest was called, was an old soldier, Lucius, a Roman centurion who worshipped Lord Apollo.

  Lucius had been captured and enslaved during Crassus’ invasion of Parthia in the century before Christ. He escaped with the help of his god, who then led him to one of the portals of the shrine. The reigning priest at that time was a devoted follower of Dionysius. Lucius found and killed the man, put on the silver mask, and became Rex in his place.

  Shortly after he built the cabin, George Lowell Stoneham built a cottage for his family at the foot of the mountain. But he spent much time up in the grove. After the death of his wife, he even stayed there, snow-bound, for several winters researching, he said, insect hibernation.

  In warmer seasons, ladies in the comfortable new parlors at Baxter’s Hotel alluded to the professor’s loneliness. Conversation over brandy in the clubrooms of the recently built Bachelor’s Point Aquaphiliacs Society, dwelt on the “fog of war” that sometimes befell a hero.

  There was some truth in all that. But what only Stoneham’s daughter Helen knew was that beyond the locked door of the snowbound cabin, two old soldiers talked their days away in Latin. They sat on marble benches overlooking a cypress grove above a still lake in Second Century Italy.

  Lucius would look out into the summer haze, and come to attention each time a figure appeared, wondering, the professor knew, if this was the agent of his death.

  Then on a morning one May, George Lowell Stoneham was discovered sitting in his cabin with a look of peace on his face. A shrapnel splinter, planted in a young soldier’s arm during the Wilderness campaign thirty-five years before, had worked its way loose and found his heart.

  Professor Stoneham’s daughter and only child, Helen, inherited the Mt. Airey property. Talk at the Thursday Cotillions in the splendid summer ballroom of Baxter’s Grande Hotel had long spun around the daughter, “With old Stoneham’s eyes and Simon Garde’s millions.”

  For Helen was the first of the Boston girls to marry New York money. And such money and such a New York man! Garde’s hands were on all the late nineteenth century levers: steel, railroads, shipping. His origins were obscure. Not quite, a few hinted, Anglo Saxon. The euphemism used around the Aquaphiliacs’ Society was “Eastern.”

  In the great age of buying and building on Mt. Airey, none built better or on a grander scale than Mr. and Mrs. Garde. The old Stoneham property expanded, stretched down to the sea. The new “cottage,” Joyous Garde, was sweeping, almost Mediterranean, with its Doric columns and marble terraces, its hundred windows that flamed in the rising sun.

  With all this, Helen did not neglect Stoneham Cabin up on the mountain. Over the years, it became quite a rambling affair. The slope on which it was built, the pine grove in which it sat, made its size and shape hard to calculate.

  In the earliest years of the century, after the birth of her son, George, it was remarked that Helen Stoneh
am Garde came up long before the season and stayed well afterwards. And that she was interested in things Chinese. Not the collections of vases and fans that so many clipper-captain ancestors had brought home, but earthenware jugs, wooden sandals, bows and arrows. And she studied the language. Not high Mandarin, apparently, but some guttural peasant dialect.

  Relations with her husband were also a subject for discussion. They were rarely seen together. In 1906, the demented millionaire Harry Thaw shot the philandering architect Stanford White on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in New York. And the men taking part in the Bachelor’s Point Grand Regatta that year joked about how Simon Garde had been sitting two tables away. “As easily it might have been some other irate cuckold with a gun and Sanford White might be building our new yacht club right now.”

  At the 1912 Charity Ball for the Penoquot Landing Fisherfolk Relief Fund in Baxter’s Grande Pavilion, the Gardes made a joint entrance. This was an event rare enough to upstage former President Teddy Roosevelt about to campaign as a Bull Moose.

  Simon Garde, famously, mysteriously, died when the French liner Marseilles was sunk by a U-boat in 1916. Speculation flourished as to where he was bound and the nature of his mission. When his affairs, financial and otherwise, were untangled, his widow was said to be one of the wealthiest women in the nation.

  Helen Stoneham Garde, a true child of New England, never took her attention far from the money. Horses were her other interest besides chinoise. She bred them and raced them. And they won. Much of her time was spent on the Mt. Airey estates. Stories of her reclusivity abounded.

  The truth, her granddaughter Julia knew, would have stunned even the most avid of the gossips. For around the turn of the century, Lucius had been replaced. A single arrow in the eye had left the old Rex sprawling on the stone threshold of the shrine. His helmet, his sword, and the matched pair of Colt Naval Revolvers that had been a gift from George Stoneham, lay scattered like toys.

  A new Rex, or more accurately a Regina, picked the silver mask out of the dust and put it on. This was Ki Mien from north China, a servant of the goddess of forests and woods, and a huntress of huge ability.

  From a few allusions her grandmother dropped, Julia deduced that Helen Garde and the priestess had, over the next two decades, forged a union. Unknown to any mortal on the Island or in the world, they formed what was called in those days a Boston marriage.

  In the years that Helen was occupied with Ki Mien, motorcars came to Mt. Airey. Their staunchest supporter was George “Flash” Garde, Simon and Helen’s son and only child. “A damned fine looking piece of American beef,” as a visiting Englishman remarked.

  Whether boy or man, Flash Garde could never drive fast enough. His custom-built Locomobile, all brass and polish and exhaust, was one of the hazards of Olympia Drive. “Racing to the next highball and low lady,” it was said at Bachelor’s Point. “Such a disappointment to his mother,” they sighed at Baxter’s.

  In fact, his mother seemed unbothered. Perhaps this was because she had, quite early on, arranged his marriage to Cissy Custis, the brightest of the famous Custis sisters. The birth of her granddaughter Julia guaranteed the only succession that really mattered to her.

  3.

  In 1954, on the evening of the last day of summer, Julia had supper in Old Cottage kitchen with the Eders. Mrs. Eder made the same comforting chicken pie she remembered.

  The nursery up at Joyous Garde was vast. On its walls were murals of the cat playing the fiddle and the cow jumping the moon. It contained a puppet theater and a play house big enough to walk around in if you were small enough. But some of Julia’s strongest memories of Mt Airey centered on Old Cottage.

  The most vivid of all began one high summer day in the early 1920s. Her grandmother, as she sometimes did, had taken Julia out of the care of her English nurse and her French governess.

  When it was just the two of them, Helen Stoneham Garde raised her right hand and asked, “Do you swear on the head of Ruggles The One-Eared Rabbit, not to tell anybody what we will see today?”

  Time with her grandmother was always a great adventure. Julia held up the stuffed animal, worn featureless with love, and promised. Then they went for a walk.

  Julia was in a pinafore and sandals and held Ruggles by his remaining ear. The woman of incalculable wealth wore sensible shoes and a plain skirt and carried a picnic basket. Their walk was a long one for somebody with short legs. But finches sang, fledglings chirped on oak branches. Invisible through the leaves, a woodpecker drilled a maple trunk. Red squirrels and jays spread news of their passage.

  Up the side of Mt. Airey, Helen led her grandchild to the silent white pine grove that overlooked deep, still waters. The Cabin itself was all odd angles, gray shingles and stone under a red roof. It was Julia’s first visit to the place.

  Years later, when she was able to calculate such things, she realized that the dimensions of Stoneham Cabin did not quite pan out. But only a very persistent visitor would note that something was missing, that one room always remained unexplored.

  That first time, on a sunny porch, visible from no angle outside the Cabin, Helen Garde set down the basket, unpacked wine and sandwiches, along with milk, and a pudding for Julia. Then she stood behind her granddaughter and put her hands on the child’s shoulders.

  “Julia, I should like you to meet Alcier, whom we call The Rex.”

  The man in the doorway was big and square-built with dark skin and curly, black hair. His voice was low, and, like Mademoiselle Martine, he spoke French, though his was different. He wore sandals and a white shirt and trousers. The priest bowed and said, “I am happy to meet the tiny lady.”

  He was not frightening at all. On the contrary, morning doves fed out of his hand and he admired Ruggles very much.When they had finished lunch, the Rex asked her grandmother if he could show Julia what lay inside.

  The two of them passed through a curtain that the child could feel but couldn’t see. She found herself in a round room with doors open in all directions. It was more than a small child could encompass. That first time, she was aware only of a cave opening onto a snowy winter morning and an avenue of trees with the moon above them.

  Then Alcier faced her across a fire that flickered in the center of the room even on this warm day. He put on a silver mask that covered his face, with openings for his eyes, nostrils and mouth, and said, “Just as your grandmother welcomed me to her house, so, as servant of the gods, I welcome you to the Shrine Of The Twelve Portals.”

  But even as gods spoke through him, Julia could see that Alcier smiled and that his eyes were kind. So she wasn’t a bit afraid.

  When it was time to say goodbye, the Rex stood on the porch and bowed slightly. A red-tailed hawk came down and sat on his wrist. Because of Alcier’s manners, Julia was never frightened of the Rex. Even later when she had seen him wiping his machete clean.

  As a small child, Julia didn’t know why her grandmother made her promise not to tell anyone about the hawk and the invisible curtain and the nice black man who lived up in the cabin. But she didn’t.

  Children who tell adults everything are trying to make them as wise as they. Just as children who ask questions already know why the sky is blue and where the lost kitten has gone. What they need is the confirmation that the odd and frightening magic that has turned adults into giants has not completely addled their brains. That Julia didn’t need such reassurance she attributed to her grandmother and to Alcier.

  On her next visit, she learned to call the place with the flame, the Still Room. She found out that it was a shrine, a place of the gods, and that Alcier was a priest, though much different than the ones in the Episcopal church. On the second visit she noticed Alcier’s slight limp.

  Her grandmother never went inside with them. On Julia’s next few visits over several summers, she and Alcier sat on stools in the Still Room and looked out through the twelve doors. The Rex patrolled each of these entrances every day. He had a wife and, over the ye
ars, several children whom Julia met. Though she never was told exactly where they lived.

  Soon, she had learned the name of what lay beyond each portal: jungle, cypress grove, dark forest, tundra, desert, rock-bound island, marsh, river valley, mountain, cave, plains, sandy shore.

  At first she was accompanied up the mountain by her grandmother. Then, in the summer she turned twelve, Julia was allowed to go by herself. By that time, she and Alcier had gone through each of the doors and explored what lay beyond.

  The hour of the day, the climate, even Julia came to realize, the continent varied beyond each portal. All but one, in those years, had a shrine of some kind. This might be a grove or a cave, or a rocky cavern, with a fire burning and, somewhere nearby, a body of water still as a mirror.

  The plains, even then, had become a wasteland of slag heaps and railroad sidings. Julia did not remember ever having seen it otherwise.

  If she loved Alcier, and she did, it was not because he spared her the truth in his quiet voice and French from the Green Antilles. Early on he showed her the fascinating scar on his left leg and explained that he was an escaped slave, “Like each Rex past and to be.”

  He told her how he had been brought over the wide waters when he was younger than she, how he had grown up on a plantation in the Sugar Islands. How he had been a house servant, how he had run away and been brought back in chains with his leg torn open.

  Julia already knew how one Rex succeeded another. But on that first summer she visited the cabin alone, she and Alcier had a picnic on the wide, empty beach on the Indochina Sea, and she finally asked how it had happened.

  Before he answered, Alcier drew the silver mask out of the satchel he always carried. Julia noticed that he hardly had to guide it. The mask moved by itself to his face. Then he spoke.

  “Where I lived, we had a public name for the bringer of wisdom. And a private name known only by those to whom She spoke. When I was very young, She sent me dreams. But after I was taken beyond the sea, it was as if I was lost and She couldn’t find me.